I haven't written here in a while - I had too much going on for a time (new job, house hopping, a month back in Europe) and then quite suddenly nothing going on at all (a longer story that involves a month off work and a fucking kangaroo, more on this below). I never seemed to settle into that middle place where writing to you felt achievable and joyous.

A couple of months ago I paused paid subscriptions and won't revive them until I'm back in a regular writing cadence, as this only seems fair. Thank you to the small group of you who support me in this way! For now, a little update to explain some of my absence. I hope to be back soon.

So I got this fucking virus a month ago called Ross River virus. Firstly - hate the name, very un-chic. Secondly, I feel like the word virus conjures up the image of a sore throat and a sniffle, but not this motherfucker. Classification-wise, Ross River sits in the same world as dengue and zika, the kind of virus a UN body would hand-wring over.

Basically, a mosquito bit a kangaroo (most likely) that was infected with the virus and then bit me. There are ~5000 cases a year and it's largely endemic to Australia. I am, it cannot be overstated, comically unlucky, although the exclusivity of being part of a 0.01% does somewhat counteract the aforementioned un-chicness of the name and general vibe. It's not fatal - ultimately I will be fine and I have returned to this fact many times as a salve, but you will have to indulge my forthcoming dramatics around this because holy shit.

In the language of virology, a virus infects a living organism (me) and so I become its host. But again the words fail me, for the idea of hosting, I think, implies a kind of power dynamic - that yes, you are housing a temporary guest, but ultimately you retain some control over the conditions of its stay.

In truth, for the last month, I have felt like I have no form or purpose outside of negotiating this new foreign object's passage. The guest has become the host, the virus and I have merged, and that is that. There is no treatment. There's not been space for anything else.

The most pronounced physical symptom is a form of polyarthritis meaning I experienced severe arthritic pain in all of my joints. At first I couldn't walk without pain, couldn't use my hands, and was confined to the small square meterage between my bed and the bathroom. I was fatigued, falling asleep constantly, but never sleeping through the night. Every time I went from sitting to standing I risked losing consciousness. I got a sty from the sleep deprivation, my face was flushed all the time, I felt like I was burning up despite my temperature remaining at a constant. Some of this has now dialled down, some of it persists.

Two particularly strange wrinkles - one, the brain fog. I had erroneously thought of brain fog as, like, having a shit day where you're a bit out of sorts. But this was a kind of sustained mental stuntedness, the feeling that I was rapidly becoming dumber as the weeks crawled on. I could not follow a thought through to its end, often forgetting what I was thinking about mid-thought, which is a particularly despairing phenomenon. I couldn't read or even focus on TV because my mind would enter into an endless taxi with no intention of taking off. I got stuck doom-scrolling and watching YouTube videos with titles like Every Villain in Game of Thrones Ranked because this was all my bowl-of-porridge-ass brain could comprehend. Agonisingly, I tried to tell my friends what was happening but the words wouldn't come together in the ways I wanted. It was so distressing, so dread-inducing, and the helplessness of not being able to say, let alone make internal sense, of what was occurring in my mind, dwarfed the severity of any physical symptom.

Two, something I am still contending with… suddenly, with no notice, my houseguest yeets out of my body for a bit, seemingly for the lols. I will wake up one day and be entirely functional, with only vestigial traces of some of the less egregious physical symptoms. I am writing this from one of those little oases, the longest one yet - five days. But the feeling that this produces is a kind of skittishness where, unable to predict when I will be struck down again, I hesitate to put any longer-term plans into motion (which in this context means: try to go back to work properly, try to start exercising again, try to start a TV show). It also creates a mental game where I feel I have to over-explain to friends and colleagues in moments of wellness that my being so spritely is an exception to my default state and that when I am absent I really am suffering in a way that warrants my moaning about it.

I don't imagine that this overwrought description of my last month of illness is particularly revelatory or interesting, but if you've gotten this far, thank you. If I'm lucky, I'll be out of the woods in the next couple of weeks. If I'm unlucky I could be stuck in this loop for another half a year. If I'm very unlucky (about 15% of cases) this will develop into chronic fatigue and may remain with me for life. Obviously that sounds absolutely cooked, so I am choosing optimism.

I don't think I come out of this the same, though. I have read many accounts of people who have had this and many share that it permanently altered some part of their physiology - a reduced stamina, a wavering attention span, less resilience to an off day or a big night. While I'm in it I can have no conclusion about what I gain or lose from it, only that it's happening. But I can say with certainty that having the faculty to put into words the strangeness and desolation of this experience is a milestone that I am celebrating. With time, the cycles of sickness and convalescence should get shorter and shorter. With time, I'll return to myself with more frequency. With time, future me laughs this off as that time a kangaroo and a mosquito unknowingly conspired to give me a nervous breakdown (and almost succeeded, the fuckers).

But for now, your sick friend is signing off for his lunch-time nap.

Thanks for reading, even when it's just me complaining.

It has just started to spit rain when I see the fox.

It is twisted away from me, hind legs crossed like a ribbon, its moistening body tucked between the pole of a traffic light and a wedge-shaped concrete barrier. Within view is a slice of its upturned face, oily with blood, a bright circle looping its open mouth like a planet’s rings.

The light winks green, and red, and green again, a slot machine for walking. A little earthquake flings droplets from the roof of my rain-jacket, and I realise I’ve dipped my head down to cry.

Foxes are a pest in Australia. They invaded this land alongside the people who brought them and have spread across the landmass, extinguishing native species and causing irreversible havoc. Not only is fox hunting legal in all states, but baiting and violence is encouraged. I’ve always found it curious the firm consensus among Australians that these animals absolutely do not belong here, but the people who brought them unequivocally do.

Back at the pedestrian crossing, questions come like push-notifications. Where did this fox come from? How did it make it to a busy intersection? Was it moved to this undignified clearing, or did it crawl there for safety as it choked on its own guts? And why am I crying?

Unlike the descendants of the people who claimed this country for their own, the Australian fox has no concept of its history. It does not understand that its fore-foxes crept out across an old-but-new land and made a clumsy home out of a place they might not have otherwise opted for. This fox knows only what it has been shown, what the foxes before it adapted to. It paws into an unaccommodating dirt, skewers unfamiliar critters to feed its young, and tries to make it work, tries to secure its own survival. It tries to slot into the ecosystem because that’s the only choice it can make, and we hate it, we loathe it for trying.

I am not crying because I have romanticised the plight of the white man's fox. I am crying because I am sad, and it’s the divine right of the sad to be self-involved and insert themselves into whatever feels tragic around them. I am crying because in this moment, a tote bag of groceries slung across my weary side, I feel like I am this fox - trying to make a home here, trying to make do, constantly swallowing the feeling that I am butting against a choice made for me a generation ago, to be in this place, to mould my surroundings into a house I can live in.

I have written so much in this newsletter about belonging (or not) to a place that it has become insular and repetitive. Blah blah, my parents are immigrants. I swing from wondering if my home is abroad, to contemplating a home here, to deciding home is an unworkable construct altogether. The answer is that there is no answer. Home is solid for some, elusive for others. My sense of home, for whatever host of reasons, came out of me like a baby tooth, and nothing grew in its place. Any bid to remake an alternative returns an error message. 404: home not found (does not exist, dummy).

The light winks green again and I walk. I don't look back. The evenings are arriving earlier, and not long after I make it to the apartment I've been housesitting, night comes down like a guillotine. The red and green birds that fly right up to the balcony and demand feeding scream at me from the window, which surprises me - I've never seen them come at night before. I try to coax one to eat out of my hand, but she nicks my finger as if to say no, weirdo, and I accept her dismay. I look out to the vista I have of the headland, watch the ocean gurgle. The line of cars that snakes through the road below me is thinning, lights fanning on to guide people back to, or away from their homes. There’s that pesky home again.

My phone buzzes and it’s my sister sending me photos of my nephew’s first trip to daycare. They’ve made him pose with a comically large backpack on, so big that his doughy knees are buckling and his dad has to hold him up like a marionette. I laugh, because it's impossible not to, and then I cry again. Big, burly sobs. I love him so much. I never thought I would love a child like this.

There are days like today, where the fact that I belong to this place feels like a throat I never manage to clear, an exam I haven't studied for. But as I laugh again at this little boy, resplendent and giddy, I wonder if maybe there's a place for me here yet still. Maybe the only home I'll ever need is wherever he will be.

📍 São Paulo

R is all hair and noise when he first passes me by.

I have arrived in the city only hours before, and am in the first stage of jetlag: denial. I am sat across from the chaos of the hostel bar, circling a straw through my free caipirinha and wrenching my eyes open through pure will. Brazil is still theoretical, all I have seen is the inside of the airport and the highway churning past in my Uber. I need to stay up, I need to eat something. I need to meet this boy from the internet.

It's a modern love story, so R and I have already spoken online. What happened is that before leaving for Brazil I had a small crisis and impulsively posted a video on Instagram asking if any of my friends could link me up with their Brazilian mates, for fear of being lonely during my travels. Improbably (or predictably, if you ask any of my friends here about how Brazilians react to gringos speaking Portuguese) the video blew up, racking up thousands of views and comments and completely overwhelming my inbox with offers from strangers for rolêzinhos in every city and town across the country. I came across R because they sent me a message talking about their work taking queer, Black folks to nature spots and waterfalls just outside São Paulo. Impossibly, they also worked at the hostel I'd already booked to stay at, and so we accepted that an invisible queer hand was guiding our eventual meeting. R promised to swing by the hostel my first night.

I hear him before I see him. He is singing greetings to colleagues and guests, and everyone is happily turning away from what they’re doing to affirm his passage. He floats through the bar and straight to the reception, before circling back to meet my eyes. He smiles and all fatigue is leached out of me.

I don't remember what we say to each other in that first interaction, even what language we speak. I do remember that a beat later I am shyly asking them to help me order food from a delivery app I've downloaded and can't unpuzzle, to which they suggest we just cross the road and eat something quick and cheap. When we arrive at the restaurant, I observe him in the same routine, laughing airily and greeting the workers and diners around us, and I watch in awe as everyone takes on a different light, relaxes into themselves in his presence.

We talk and talk and I sip from the juice of a fruit I can't pronounce. The conversation snakes between English and Portuguese, and we touch on our families, our shared passions, Blackness in Brazil. They tell me about the wave of hype the country is negotiating from outside, about gentrification and tourism, about untranslatable words, about the beauty of moving through languages, about their gender. Every time he meets my gaze my stomach judders with a knowing that is deep and unplaceable, like I am meeting someone I already know. It isn't long before we kiss.

The next morning I wake up and he is a wave in my bed, his bleached blonde curls pushed away from his face, which even in rest seems to have the upturned quality of a smile. The day comes into being as we do, and as hot light blinks through the parting of the curtains, R and I trade coy compliments.

Lindo, I say. Gato, they reply. Bonitão, I offer.

Perigoso, they wink. ‘Dangerous’. I already know what they mean.

The words are badly conveying something thick and unruly that has come alive between us, the feeling of two planets in parallel orbit that have slipped into a singular stream. We are running hot into each other, and it's either reckless or glorious or both. I have the urge, from somewhere inside me I can't locate, to say I love you, and I swallow down the absurdity of it, the strangeness of its immediacy.

The day falls into its rhythm. R showers and speeds off to the reception.

I go make Brazil untheoretical.

Two weeks later, I have gone and come back to São Paulo, and R and I have sped-run dating. We've gone to see Wicked Part 2 together. He's held my hand and led me around the city like a lost child. I've joined him on one of his tours, helping him parade around a group of gringos as if I'm not one of them. We've even spent a day luxuriating in bed, blocking out the world as if it were a mere inconvenience to our cavernous pleasure.

After spending a night at his place in the west of the city, we are on the bus back into town when he mouths at me something from across the aisle, commuters stacked between us like background actors.

Eu to me apaixonando por você.

This is a difficult thing to translate. It exists somewhere between ‘I'm catching feelings’ and ‘I'm falling in love with you’, and the valley of ambiguity blooms in me a quiet panic. Before it can spread, though, before a storm of thoughts take over, I look at the man glistening before me, take a steady breath, and mouth it back.

Later, we find seats in the back of the bus and chew this through. What does it mean for us to se apaixonar, how does this sit in us, in our shifting realities? We are speaking in Portuguese and as the conversation rolls on I feel how the language wrangles me away from the essence of what I want to say, which is that to fall in love is to fall, and to fall is to anticipate the pain of impact as you hit the ground. I want to say that I am scared to make contact with the ground without assurances that he will be there to nurse the inevitable wounds, but the words elude me, even in my native language, and so instead I produce the pre-cursor to words, sounds, then eventually tears, and he holds it all, with the tenderness of how one might hold a small bird.

And what about just appreciating the present, appreciating the feeling for what it is while it is happening? R says this as I return to myself and immediately I know it is the only option. The instinct to construct something material around love as it sprouts into being is an instinct borne of a desire of security, perhaps ownership. There is no security in a long spate of travel, there is no mooring. What R is saying is - why try to own each other, when we can instead enjoy each other, with the knowledge that though what we are experiencing has a predestined end, it doesn't have to be rendered any less important or meaningful?

At this wisdom I can only acquiesce.

📍 Belo Horizonte

R and I are chatting on Whatsapp, me having traveled onward to a city more inland in the country. We don't know when we will see each other again, if ever, but we are trading messages, photos, and voice notes. I am getting a sense of the predictable cadence of their days, and the relative slipperiness of mine, drifting from place to place. He has sent me a long voice note in English which I listen to as I patter along the streets of downtown. He is recounting his day and I am smiling at the gentle lilt of his accent, the inherent melody that no Brazilian seems to be able to shake.

As they wrap up their diligent recount of the day there is a hefty pause, a stutter in their speech.

…and, well, I don't know, I really want to say this so I guess I'll just say this…I love you!

Também te amo, I say out loud, releasing the words I have been bottling in and scattering them into the orange night, to find their own way through the world.

Everyone keeps telling me that summer is over.

It’s on the lips of all my friends here in London, who have sheepishly brought out their coats and are collectively managing my descent into sunshine-grief, my realisation that the big, life-bringing ball has now receded behind a churning, grey sky. I did what any respectable Londoner – even a temporary one – does in September and fled south, this time to Barcelona for a well-timed work trip. But now that I’m back the reality has set in. The air is grating, the evenings are flirting with the afternoons, the season is undeniably shifting.

If it is decreed that summer is over, then let it be known I had a good one, and by good I mean frenetic, unforgiving and vaguely reckless. I have catapulted out of the stasis of my previous life in Lisbon and entered into a kind of farewell tour of Europe before I make my slow move back to Australia, passing through cities like a happy ghost, hooking in the occasional curious friend.

I gave myself a month off writing, because I was enjoying too much the liquid feeling of snaking from one significant last time to another, not ready yet to make sense of all the movement. And to be honest, I’m not about to start. It’s been weirdly relieving to just skate by for a bit without trying to shake my life like a magic 8 ball. Each time I have said goodbye to a person, a place, or a feeling, I have petulantly refused it any cosmic significance. I'm sure this will come back to bite me. I'm old enough to know that holding emotions like an in-breath doesn't work, but young enough to keep trying.

There is one place, though, standing obstinate as I try to style out a casual goodbye. It laughs as I shirk it off, drags me to my feet to rise to the occasion of our mutual parting. It’s the place I am writing this from, in a familiar nook in a café on the edge of the city’s whimsical East.

Fucking London, man.

I found myself, while in Barcelona, in an unexpected conversation with a pink-haired man from Honduras. He had waved me over from an adjacent table on the esplanade we were both sitting at, and, unfazed by my halting Castellano, smiled in refusal at my bids to switch to English. I lurched through our conversation in half-sentences, wanting to honour the plot that life was offering me. He asked me where I lived, a more complicated question than he could have realised, and so I answered in simple terms.

Londres, I smiled. London.

Ah, he glistened, todavía no he visitado, ¿cómo es?

He'd never visited. How to describe such an exquisite and taxing city in a language I am barely holding onto?

Es… grande? I said, child-like. Es como… una ciudad que siempre está… bailando?

It’s like a city which is always dancing, I said.

Bailando? He laughed beautifully, swaying from side to side to imaginary music. I grinned.

It’s funny what your mind offers you when you’re forced out of the comfort of your own tongue.

It’s impossible to be still in London, because to be still runs counter to what the city is telling you: move! now! or be moved! Londoners harrumph when the space around us does anything but rush by – a clueless tourist staring up at an ancient building, a series of strikes that halt the public transport system, the otherwise silencing cloak of nightfall – a lack of movement is suspicious, and must be bested by force.

When you first settle here, it is hard to respond to this command with grace. The city shoves you around, dangles you high from one event and throws you into another at a violent, exhausting cadence. But as time passes, you start to tune into the rhythm, the roiling boil of people, the astounding force of everyone so fully engaged in the act of their being. Then, without knowing it, you are side-stepping, rolling your shoulders, leaping from happening to happening. You are, indeed, dancing. And so is everyone around you. The dancing city.

Eight years I spent in this place, and yet when I swung back for my planned sojourn across the end of summer, I forgot all of this. I burst into London utterly drunk on its possibilities and found myself at the end of the month gasping for air, out-of-step. I was unpracticed. Of course, I had an impossible amount of fun, I threw myself into the swell. But when September rolled around I found myself nursing a psychic hangover.

The thing about this dancing city is that you have to go elsewhere when you don’t want to dance. Some people burrow into the change of season, retreat into their flat-share living rooms as the sky darkens and try to resist the pull, but I’ve never found that to be a suitable counter to the pace the city demands. Because, really, the tempo of London never slows, its barriers to participation just escalate. As the cold descends, now, to be in constant motion, you must engage in an elaborate ritual of undressing and redressing wherever you go, dis-assembling the sandwich of clothing you’re in. The forever-dance now has an element of prop-work. People go pink and puffy and they bear it, because it’s London. People thaw out and refreeze, but don’t stop. I never managed it gracefully, no matter how hard I tried.

I have always found this city to be a complicated place, and I am routinely unfair in my assessment of it. I certainly harbour some resentment that I made a home, and an enviable family of friends, in a place that I find impossible to truly love, let alone to live in. I also know, having been flung from the hamster wheel, that I don’t have the constitution to keep up with what this place asks of me. Every friend I have here is in perpetual motion, and they suit it, it agrees with them, or they were born here and so have been moulded by it. But I can’t sustain it, I won't. And so I pout and make disagreeable noises whenever I’m back, to absolutely no-one’s enjoyment.

But what a place. Nowhere I know is so loud with human ingenuity, so pregnant with people who have made themselves tantalising promises. The river flings through the city and on either side, so many criss-crossing potentialities, so many centuries of experimentation and empire, so much beautiful immediacy, so much unknowable suffering all jammed into one space. It’s so monumental, so terrifying, so utterly indivisible. Something pongs in the London air, and I think it might be the recycled in-out breath of people with mouths agape in wonder, that this place exists, that it all comes together somehow, that they’ve finally made it.

I am breaking up with London, again. I am good at break-ups now, I have been doing them all summer, and in a way, all my life. There comes a softening moment in every break-up where you look back, years past the apex of the heartache, and see your grief for what it really was - a bundle of dashed hopes, a collection of stories that weren't dignified with a neat end, a love that was extinguished before it could be fully expressed. You finally see how the shadow of the loss shaped you, pulled you benevolently onto another path, wrenched you away into something better. You feel, impossibly, thankful for your grief, thankful for the person or place that precipitated it.

I owe London a lot, but I am determined to grieve it in passing, curmudgeonly, as I speed through it on my way elsewhere, kissing friends and haemorrhaging money as I go. I am determined to not stop for too long to take in the enormity of my loss, the extent of my gratitude.

Think of it as a tribute to the dancing city.

Thanks for reading and I hope your summer was as joyful and onerous as mine, as all good summers should be. This coming month I will be in Oslo, and Berlin, as well as London, continuing my farewell tour. If you're in any of these cities and fancy connecting, just shoot me a message. And for the literal 7 subscribers I have in Brazil - I will be in your country soon! Watch this space :-)

I had never met my landlord before yesterday, only his older brother, who is cheerful and avuncular and once brought me a 2 litre vat of olive oil straight from his farm. The man I have been paying a small fortune to every month trundled in with his wife, another brother, and a cabal of relatives, who spoke to me in an American-inflected English, launching into stories about their emigration to New Jersey, how much they hated the orange man, but how much they hated Portugal too.

We are a good people, but there is nothing left for anyone here, his wife said to me sadly, gesturing to the floor. Even our kids don't want to come here. But have you enjoyed your time in Portugal?

My landlord smiled weakly and didn't ask my name. I guess he already knew it. He seemed like the kind of man who could get away with sidestepping pleasantries, whose world bent around him to ensure his safe passage. He surveyed the space with an easy precision, the tongue of the measuring tape never leaving his thick hands, and asked me to move out of the way, more than once, not unkindly. The porteira once told me that these three brothers had grown up in this apartment, that their mother had gotten very ill when they were of university age, and two of them had left to the US to seek something better. I felt like I had been told something private, some family history I probably ought not to know. To move across an ocean in order to make something of yourself is an exposing act. I know it well.

I watched as they discussed renovations to come and fidgeted anxiously from my assigned corner. My head swam. At once, I had a coarse, dizzy feeling, a feeling of wanting to walk up to the five of them and push myself into their sight lines, to say in a steady and compelling voice that, hey, I was here, I am here, this space was mine too, and you should know that I belonged to it, momentarily. I made something of myself in the space that you left, and you made something of yourselves away from it, and isn't there a miracle in that we should name? That we all became something away from the places that made us?

I made to take a step forward but stayed still, queasy in the realisation of my forthcoming displacement. The space was no longer mine. Really, it had never been.

Sorry for the inconvenience, we won't be much longer. My landlord peered at me as if through glass.

What will I have for breakfast tomorrow, once my blender is gone, once this space is razed of all of the things that made it a home, that made it, briefly, a place where people loved and ate and felt warm in its walls? What will I do when I cleave open my eyes and there are no remnants of me left here, when the little and big things I bought to fill out the swollen space have been packed away, when there's nothing to register a life that was lived except alien imprints, the scuffed squares and rectangles on glossy hardwood floors?

A woman is coming to look at my bed. Earlier in the day we spoke over the phone and I stumbled over the words for bring and take, forgot the word for headboard. I could hear her smiling over the line. I immediately decided to sell her the bed.

She comes and she comes with stories. She tells me about her spectacular divorce, how she left Brazil with her daughter to find solace in Europe. She tells me about Bahia, where she is from, and tells me I should go, because the women will be fighting over me. I inquire about the men and she laughs coyly, and her laughter is bright and hopeful. She talks about her favourite magazine, fetching me her copy from the black canvas trolley she has brought and insisting I take it. She asks for a glass of water and I wince at my forgetting to offer, but she follows me into the kitchen and tells me about how her parents died during the pandemic, quite suddenly, in their 90s. I grimace in her direction, utterly without the right words to express sincere sympathy – but she is smiling.

It was beautiful, she says, they were in separate hospital units but they died within minutes of each other.

I am enthralled. I find myself spilling my life out to her in great cords, my anxieties about leaving, the people I will miss and the people I feel bad about not missing, how strange it has been to pack up an apartment and with it put memories into boxes, how little magic I have made out of the summer so far. She listens and calls me meu querido and takes my hand in hers, and I truly think I might love this Brazilian woman in this moment as much as I love my own family.

It is an hour before we make it to the bedroom so she can see what she is buying and the appraisal is swift. Essa é minha cama, she says with pulsing eyes, and she's right.

When she fetches it that evening, two young guys prising it apart and taking it bit by bit down the staircase like worker ants, the bedroom is achingly empty, and I cannot imagine that there was ever a bed there, even less so that it was ever mine.

A friend takes me cycling along the water's edge, because I am full of vigour for seeing as much of Lisbon before I go, and I like the idea of earning my way to the beach. The day starts grey but flickers into blue and by the time we reach the hungry mouth of the ocean, we are dry in our own salt, pain across my back and shoulders like being pressed into a hot pan. We eat and talk about our lives and strip to our underwear and meet the lapping water.

When we cycle back, our legs whirring and the helmet rubbing skin raw at the tops of my ears, I see the oncoming vista of the city all at once, and for a moment my life feels uncomplicated and singular and I am swept up in the exacting pleasure of moving in one direction, at pace, with nowhere to be but where I am going.

A boy came round last week who I have seen once a year, like clockwork, since I first arrived in this country. He texts me intermittently - Saudades de você, viu? At first I would reply, suggest we meet, and we would both perform limited availability, until one of us folded back into the routines of his life. Then a month later my phone would flicker and I'd see his name again.

Once a year we get our act together. The first time I was freshly single and found his advances overwhelming, wounding, having forgotten the particular bleakness of being touched by a stranger. He was soothing, careful, and when he spoke I caught the smallest hint of sadness, which softened me. After, we had sat in the purple light of mid-winter and I had nuzzled myself into his side as he corrected my conjugations and gender accordances. We were two men who were thoroughly displaced, but nesting ourselves in that particular sofa, even if just for an afternoon, felt like a gesture towards rootedness.

Last week we grabbed lunch at a buffet restaurant, €9.95 each, and when he left for the bathroom midway through dessert, I saw immediately that he was slipping away to pay. I didn't stop him. I knew we would both find some pleasure in the romance of it, the performance that we might mean more to each other than we actually did. My leaving, news of which I had delivered to him over text with the seriousness of a sermon, had enlivened a kind of tenderness between us that I imagined was only surfacing because we both felt safe in its impermanence. We would slip out of this intimacy and back into the churn of our parallel lives within weeks. In that way, we were risking little.

His life, in his telling, is onerous. He works at a restaurant in the tourist district and is always fielding yappy, pink British men on stag dos whose regional English he can't make sense of, or fussy older French couples who expect him to have sommelier-level wine knowledge. He complains about this, about the repetitiousness of the work, about how much longer he has to wait for his European passport so he can go to Luxembourg or Denmark or somewhere he won't feel like he is skimming by on the surface of his own life. I listen attentively and drag my fingers through his curly hair, kiss him between his eyes. I do think it sounds awful. In turn, I complain about the logistics of the move, the impossible frustrations of Facebook Marketplace, cumbersome farewells with friends. He hums and lays his hands on the middle of my back, as if holding me up. Neither of us have the heart to acknowledge the valley of agency between us, that he is staying here because he has to, that I am leaving because I never did.

After our lunch, he came to the apartment and we returned to the sofa we first met on, soon to be disappeared alongside everything else. We had sex, and after, while I showered, he looked over the last dregs of the objects I'd yet to sell or donate.

He took with him two protein shakers, a large metal bowl, a bag of tea candles, a loaf tin and a Portuguese novel I never got around to. He put his head on my shoulder as I opened my apartment door, letting him back out into his life.

A gente vai se ver mais uma vez antes de você ir embora, né?

Com certeza, I said. It translates to with certainty. But the only thing I am certain of is that we have committed each other to memory, and that in a passing moment on a future day, we will think of this spare romance – of our three days together across three years – and we will smile, at the generosity of our performance, of how we saw a familiar longing in each other, and how we both did our best to meet it, in the ways we could, in the moments we found.

Sometimes when I sit at this desk and hear the outside rumblings of summer in Lisbon, where the hum of traffic and people is constant, snatches of Portuguese mixed in with the foreign babble of tourists, velhas trading gossip across the street from each other in the cradling warmth, I feel a nostalgia for a time when this city felt like a friend to make, a person I had only just engaged in conversation, who was revealing her delights to me at an enchantingly languorous pace.

It was a time when I was in a relationship, would hear my then-boyfriend plonking fresh ice into the matcha he had lovingly whisked as I tapped-tapped into a blank document on this same screen, the sun serrating my body at a similar angle. I remember that there was an extended moment, a year, perhaps two, where I was sure I would anchor myself in this place as part of a loving unit, put down as many roots as I could gather, learn this earthy, mumbled language by rote, and have the city make an adult of me.

If I close my eyes I can almost take myself there, inhabit that previous life. I can feel the knot of promise in the place where my organs sit, my skin pucker in hopeful anticipation of even more new things, new people, a new way of being me. But only for a second. A parallel reality, the one I am living, blinks back into view. A dog yelps from across the way, I see a neighbour shuffle from window to window. This reality isn't a counterpoint - no, it exists as something adjacent, equally bountiful and complex. But it has a different frequency, something lower, less whimsical. It has the frequency of a place I am leaving behind.

Lisbon is an easy city to fall in love with, but I don't believe anymore that people fall in love with places. I think we fall in love with what we might be in them. I have learnt in my slightly manic search for new homes over the last decade, that a city is a projection - that it is not interested in what you want from it, that it will go on existing as it always has and always will. Your relationship to a place verges on parasocial, in that you feel you know it more than it will ever really know you. You call out in joy, or anguish, to a city - but it never answers back, just throws back your voice in echo.

When I look to my cabal of other immigrant friends, I see that we all came to this city projecting our future selves onto it. For my friends from Brazil, India, Mexico, I see that for the most part they have projected safety, stability, the pursuit of freedom from the stifling economic prospects they saw closing in from all sides. For friends from Europe or the US, I see a kind of inverse projection, an escaping, often, of the extreme hustle that many of my generation and class background get pulled into, a desire for a more balanced life. Really, both groups are trying to loosen themselves from capitalism's enduring grip, albeit on different ends of the spectrum, jerking each other about in the utterly broken system we find ourselves. Mostly, everyone is engaged in that thoroughly human pursuit - the wanting of a better life.

But me? I'm not sure. I think I moved to this city because it was the closest facsimile to home that I could render, without actually going there. I have written already about running away from Australia, and now, after these last three years in Lisbon, eight before that in London, I am finally going back. A new sense of promise has emerged, one less giddy - weathered, perhaps. For the first time I am returning to a place that is already shrouded in memories, rather than a blank slate to create new ones. The picture is more complex, I cannot fall into the trap of romanticism, I cannot start anew. And really, I never did. Wherever you go, there you are, goes the saying, and wherever I've been these last ten years, there I fucking was.

Have I fallen out of love with Lisbon? No, I have fallen out of love with the person I was sure I would become here. A decade of living abroad has left me with a lesson that I’m not sure I'd have learnt any other way - that I am me no matter where I place myself, and that me is a person to be held tenderly. A messy, anxious, big-hearted person, a person who laughs easily and cries with abandon, who possesses everything already, who does not gain by becoming anything, who is worth loving, worth celebrating, city be damned.

In truth, though, I have a terrible fondness for this city. I have grieved in it, wandered it in the yellowing night and asked it to hold me, knowing it would if it had the faculties. I have dared to be seen by its inhabitants and even hooked a few into my life's orbit, finally safe in the knowledge that good friends travel within us no matter where we go. I have loved so hard, so impossibly, in this city - I have plunged hungrily into its ocean and marvelled its crumbled walls, I have toiled in its offices and cafés, sipped an astringent bica and made small talk in halting, then eventually, easy Portuguese. I have felt at odds with it, trailing around it from the outside, and I have been thrust into the heart of it, swept up in its gorgeous rhythms.

As I count down my days in this place, a month or so more, I feel a sense of calm, a scattering of the critters of anxiety that pulsed through me as I made the decision to leave. What remains is a hulking sense of gratitude, the naked realisation of the enormity of my privilege.

What a gift to move through the world trying on versions of myself to see what fits.

And what a gift to realise I never had to.

I want to dedicate this newsletter to my wonderful friends, in this city, in the others I've called home, and in the various edges of the world we've all wandered out to. I've rendered you into the background in this story (and foregrounded myself - which will surprise none of you!) but really you have been all of it - the plot, the main characters, the ending. In every moment of joy you have smiled along with me, and in every moment of angst you have put me back together again. Thank you.

And what if I take this whole day off, shut off my pocket screen and settle into a book, contemplate the trees that still poke daringly out through the stuff we paved them over with?

And what if my to-do list remains arrogantly bloated, unconsidered, unbroken?

And what if there's untold messages that warrant reply, a thousand tabs unentered portals, an email chain in purgatory, a DM that's TBC?

And what if I flee this stifled apartment to the ocean and swim up next to some bodies that I'll briefly commune with, if only for the fact of our sharing breath, our helpless legs kicking the same small edge of the Atlantic?

And what if this is my last full summer in this continent which I've pieced a careful home out of?

And what if I spend the next few months wandering this place of conquest and overdrawn borders, if I retrieve my old rucksack from storage and take shelter in strange places with people who speak in foreign vowels, trying to figure out who the fuck I am again, like I did when I was younger?

And what if I get lonely in all of these unknown places, if the feeling knocks at me and I swing myself open to let it in?

And what if I keep kissing boys I barely know, who I'm not even sure I like, but who I might love, for I can't help but love anyone who has also made a beautiful bed of their suffering?

And what if some people observe love more than they incarnate it, if love is something they behold, watch over as sentinels, and only inhabit when it rushes up to them like an unsuspecting tide, knocks them over, winds them?

And what if I am one of those people?

And what if I keep downloading and deleting all of the apps in a ritual of disembodiment, because it is deeply soothing to play life out on the internet, to be lonely but to be safe?

And what if the air is slowly compressing us, if we are increasingly only together in our isolation, if this project we've all signed up to has managed us out of the tender joy of being held in the moments we aren't toiling?

And what if this is life is a series of becomings and unbecomings with no discernible meter, and that the only cheat code I've found is to luxuriate in the moments where its absurdity is laid out in full?

And what? And what? Will I topple? I have yet to. Will I spontaneously combust like those black and white men I read about in the Guinness World Book of Records as a child, before I knew what an algorithm was, before I mentally tracked the days until rent was due, before people I loved began to push out little versions of themselves that I watched grow up in the warp-speed time of the internet? No, I don't imagine.

I remain. I stand treacherously before unseen paths and I keep choosing one, relentless, sometimes curious, often bored. I remain because remaining is the only constant I see around me - the stars, the trees, the cycles of things that will outlive us all. If nothing else, what can we do but live in tribute to their awe-some example? If nothing else, what can we do but keep choosing?

The other day I found myself by the landing of a waterfall, surrounded by a pool of mountain water in the Pyrénées, where no other people could or would be. I took my clothes off and bathed in the water like an infant, humming something so I could place myself in the walls of noise around me, shrieking insects, crackling trees, the punch of water on water, the far off calls of birds I couldn't see.

I was tired, anxious, nursing a full head. Vultures circled above and I knew that they knew something I didn't, and I was jealous of their wisdom. I leaned further into the stream and at once it occurred to me that in a place so unfathomably far from others, in the midst of such a cacophony, that if I wanted, if it would help even an iota, I could also make noise. I could scream. That for once I didn't need to hold everything in my head - that I could impart it into the air, rid myself of it, like every being around me was doing in open chorus.

I decided to unburden myself, to re-become animal.

I drew in breath, distended my belly.

No sound, not a whimper. I floundered, tried again. My voice caught. Eventually, flabbergasted, I sunk under the skin of the rushing water and screamed below its surface, let the water carry whatever couldn't withstand the air. It is always the water.

I don’t know what it means - I don't know what most things mean. But one day I will scream out to the world without fear of the force of what it might scream back. And when that day comes, I will know that there is a part of me, a part that formed in me before I had words to name it, that has done its full orbit and found its resolution.

Thanks for reading. The next few months I am working hard, moving out of my apartment here in Lisbon, and will be walking through a cloud of logistics and farewells and various other hallmarks of transition! I will still be writing, though to what extent we will see. Thank you for always meeting me where I'm at, for subscribing to this newsletter and supporting my writing. I appreciate it and you immensely!

Life has gotten busy in a way that is compressing the time I'd normally put aside to write to you all. Sometimes chaining myself to my desk and writing with abandon produces something worthy of sharing, often it doesn't. Of late I've not put aside the time to make that gamble.

I'm always trying to understand, when it comes to writing online, where the line exists between churning out content and creating art. Is it about your intention? About how much your writing is determined by the appetite of your imagined audience? Can you create art with a growth-oriented mindset? And when writing on a platform whose steady descent into enshittification grows ever more perceptible, does everything you write, by virtue of existing on the platform, become content by default anyway?

I don't know, I can't know. And the whole business of it feels navel-gazey anyway (including these last two paragraphs, welp!). So to remedy this, as I've done before, I'm pushing this newsletter into a form that, to me, feels the least cohesive possible - a grab-bag of thoughts with no imagined audience and no throughline, or shared coherence. This gives me permission to just write - overwrought hot takes, proto-diary entries, half-formed thoughts. Ironically, depending on what our algorithmic overlords decide, it could also make this piece intensely shareable. Let's see. I am secretly hoping not.

Anyway - enough justifying. I present to you, in essence, some incoherence. I was inspired to write in this particular format after coming across Matthew Gasda's writer's diaries. There are some great gems in there, I'd recommend a look.

It feels like we are in a period of real life nostalgia, where people are remembering with fondness what life felt like before unfettered digital capitalism negotiated all the base aspects of our lives. It's become so impossible for me to extricate myself from the various technologies that govern my life that I'm only really able to revisit the analog when it's foisted upon me, or when I spend a lot of money to be very far away. Only then, in these little moments, do I sense what we have all lost, what could re-open within us if we had restructured the world differently.

I think of the first COVID lockdown in London where I'd stare down into the canal weeks after the city had shuddered violently to a stand-still and see the preponderance of aquatic life that had flourished in the absence of trawling boats, my breath catching in my throat. Or the recent power blackout in Spain and Portugal, where friends of mine in Lisbon reported moments of serenity and connectedness as they were thrust into communion with the strangers around them, their phones slowly rendered useless, the digital infrastructure around them in tantalising suspension.

I'm so far in that I'm not even sure I can formulate my complaints, I just know what I used to have that I no longer have. I want to revel in the miracle of life around me without having to retreat from my day-to-day existence either through an elaborate rural holiday or some global or regional catastrophe. I want a life where strangers speak to each other with relative ease, rather than default suspicion. I want the feeling of delight at having toiled to discover something, rather than having everything served to me, in every aspect of my life, via a disembodied, unknowable sequence of inter-locking instructions.

And sure, I have the agency to make choices to design my life in accordance with this desire, but to really do so with gusto would also represent an enormous retreat, and the giving up a lot of social, cultural and economic cachet. I have paraphrased Jenny Odell's idea of refusal in place before, but this refusal is seeming less and less tenable.

Recently a friend told me that the shuffle option on Spotify is not a true shuffle, and that the working theory is that the platform is instead more likely to replay artists who have agreed to take a cut to their royalties in order to be prioritised in the algorithm. Even this? I thought, peering down at the grab-bag of silly EDM tracks I play at the gym. Even fucking David Guetta?

On a recent trip to London I found myself in the suburbs, close to the place where my ex-boyfriend and I first met (an unremarkable pedestrian crossing opposite a Morrisons carpark - romantique). I walked over to the spot intentionally and stood and saw the ghost of him turn to me, in the Matrix-style trench he often wore in the cold, and give me a hesitant wave. It was a psychic recreation of that initial meeting, after which a world opened up to me, a world of inconceivable joy, and a grief which still percolates within me. I smiled and then I cried a little, which was what I was expecting. I felt no shame.

When we first broke up, one of the questions I kept asking my therapist was where do I put all this love? At the time love was spurting out of me as if from a ruptured artery, getting over everything and everyone, searching for a safe resting place.

I have experimented. I have re-routed that love towards myself, towards my friends, towards my work. But the spectre of grief persists, obstinate, and I've come to recognise that maybe there is a type of love that cannot be re-routed, but exists in a state of patient suspension, awaiting someone, or something to enter your orbit to meet it.

I have been reading Amia Srinavasan's The Right to Sex (gratitude to my friend Jeff who bought me it) and have found it quite revelatory, particularly her reflections on how screens and pornography have begun to negotiate even our most formative sexual experiences. I have been trying (and failing) to write about this in the context of Grindr and gay men for months now, but the problems are so manifold and cross-cutting that I keep getting caught in the weeds. Not only are Grindr and its imitators enshittifying at an alarming rate but I think their influence in restricting the boundaries around which gay male sexuality can be drawn and defined have been disastrous.

When Grindr is a gay man's first entry point into his sexuality – as it was for me – the effect is one of coerced adherence to a set of categories, or else he risks sexual alienation. Are you a Top, Bottom, Vers, or Side? You best know, because unless you choose one you will not be considered a viable sexual object. And that's not even getting into the fraught politics of who is deemed desirable and why. It feels clear to me that the space for discovery and play has narrowed. These technologies set out to create categories of belonging that have now become so restrictive and siloed that users without a sexual history that predates the hook-up app era struggle to think beyond them.

I came across a Grindr imitator recently which offers the option for users to “review” each other after a hook-up (which invariably read somewhere between ChatGPT erotica and something you'd find in the PornHub comment section), with the reviews living on the profile of each user for other users to see. It gave me pause.

I am not against the commoditisation of sex, far from it. It's not the reduction of sex into something you can be appraised for in a Yelp-type review that makes me uneasy (even if the idea of such public evaluation would terrify me personally), it's the lack of a presentation of viable alternatives. Real-life queer social spaces are shrinking, and queerphobic legislation is returning with a staggering force, all the while young people are retreating into online communities. How do we present young gay men with alternative, expansive ways of conceptualising their sexuality? Yes, sex can be bound by definitions, roles and categories, but this isn't essential to its nature. I feel like fewer and fewer gay men of my generation and younger understand that. I sure didn't.

What is the point of queerness, of the alternative innovation that it offers, as Ocean Vuong puts it, if not to interrogate and problematise the boxes that we are offered to place ourselves in? Is relenting to the forced categorisation inherent to an app like Grindr, and pursuing our sexuality within it, sexual liberation? I struggle to see it.

I want to be chosen to be loved by someone and I want to be unashamed in wanting it. It feels like saying you want to be loved, or for someone to love you, has become terribly gauche. I often wonder how we got here, where to ask plainly for something so universally sought after, has come to signal a kind of pitifulness. We are supposed to want for something but not say we want it, even though the experience of love and being loved sits at the heart of all of the various media we've dreamt up to distract us from our existential torment. Nah, not me. I want someone to love me, and I want to love them back. I will keep wanting this until I cease to exist, to my delight and detriment. And I'll keep saying it with my chest.

Since I moved to Lisbon I have mostly lived alone.

This was always baked into my move, the quiet certitude that I would prioritise solo living above all else. I didn't mind compromising on an apartment's location, or square meterage, so long as I could experience living without housemates. After so many years in the other cities I'd called home, living in cramped spaces with people I often barely knew, squabbling over bathroom slots and who would cook dinner when, having my own space felt like what I was meant to graduate into, a natural end-goal for my living situation. Peace, silence, an ultimate sense of agency. And now I had moved somewhere where I had the privilege of making this a reality.

I spent a lot of my first six months in this city smugly luxuriating in what I had sold to myself as the ultimate freedom. Traipsing naked around my apartment, making as much noise as I was humanly capable of, leaving little messes for future me to resolve. I spent a lot of that time vaguely grinning, sure that I had unlocked some supreme level of adulting that had been denied to me. I am liberated, I told myself.

In truth, I have hated living alone.

There are practical realities that I hadn't considered. Figuring out who water plants when you're away. Budgeting more time for household chores and cleaning now that you're solely responsible. Blah, blah. The supreme level of adulting I had unlocked came with some less glamorous labour. Okay, fine.

But really the experience was stirring something in me that felt much more existential. For every naked walk to the kitchen there was a long, cavernous spell of loneliness. I'd make an elaborate late night meal and suffer a pang of discomfort at the realisation that I wouldn't be sharing the spoils of my hard work. Friends would come over and make the space come alive, but always momentarily, before it settled back into a morose silence. What I had constructed as a freedom, to have full dominion over my living space to an absurd degree, started to feel like a container. Living alone meant being alone. And being so alone was not something I knew how to contend with.

Of course my experience is subjective, and informed by all the component parts that make up me. I am chatty, I am energised by others, I buckle under a mountain of chores. I have friends here and all over who live alone and excel at it, who seem to juggle the added work and the built-in isolation with zeal and fervour. I am not making a case for abolishing solo living.

But I am questioning how deeply it has ingrained itself into the aspirational blueprint for those of us who, either by virtue of our identity or our choices, sit outside of the societally-approved diktat of relationship > mortgage > children. Living alone is often presented to us as the valid alternative. There's a heavy stigma around maintaining housemates beyond our 30s (despite the fact that it will be the economic reality for many millennials and Gen Z-ers without inherited wealth) and most other intentional living arrangements (multiple couples living together, groups of friends living together, moving back in with relatives) are viewed with suspicion, as woo-woo, juvenile or cultish.

I am far from the first or most informed person to name this, and it exists within a wider context. We are increasingly lonely, encouraged to atomise further and further, our traditional kinship systems in the Global North in dire need of an update. Digital technology is proffering connection and leading to more isolation and the marked degradation of our social skills. People have stopped talking to strangers and started talking to complicated predictive text generators. Young people, particularly young men, are proving to be increasingly friendless, and finding a home in radical misogynistic slop online. But what to do and where to point? The problem is so deeply rooted, and so multi-pronged that my usual instinct, to put capitalism on trial and make a case for its dismantlement (or reformation) is feeling less and less helpful. We are down the rabbit-hole now. I'm not sure how we crawl out. After all, crawling out would require us to work together, to be in solidarity, and it seems we are losing the ability to do so with ease.

I have a housemate this month. He's Portuguese, a friend of a friend, and has come to Lisbon for a bit to work remotely. I awaited his arrival nervously, unsure how well I'd do at adapting to a new presence in my apartment, a new body to share things with, to work around.

And as I've tip-toed (fully clothed) to the kitchen in the radiant spring mornings, careful to not clatter and bang my various kitchen implements as I make breakfast, as I've walked to the bathroom and seen the door shut, a line of light emanating from within, I've found myself sighing enormously with relief - because of course I can adapt to someone else in my living space, I am human, I have been doing it since I was born, as have all the people who have ever lived before me. I am not working around my new housemate, but working with him, engaged in a dance our bodies hold the memory of. We are, briefly, in community.

I don't want to romanticise it, but it does feels like the most human thing possible, to be compromising, to be making space for each other, to witness each other in the drudgery and mess of life. I thought I would find freedom in retreating from the thorniness of the communal, but I have never felt more free than returning to negotiating my life around someone else. I can't believe I fell for the dupe.

So maybe this is the first step for crawling out of the rabbit hole? Seeing how we are being encouraged to break off into bits and resisting it. Rejoicing in the complicated mess of the whole, safe in the knowledge that it won't always be fun but it will at least be experienced together? I don't have it all figured out, but then again, I never do.

Anyway. I've gotta stop writing. It's my slot to cook lunch.

There's this part at the end of every season of RuPaul's Drag Race, the seminal piece of queer media that it is, that always makes me cringe. The practice started in the finale of season 7 and has featured, to my chagrin, in every season since. Ru begins to wax lyrical on the journeys of the various drag queen finalists, profusely congratulating them on how they've tackled the obstacles that were engineered before them. Glib music tinkles in the background, signalling to the viewer a gross shift in emotional register, and Ru reaches from behind the panel desk to reveal a framed photo of an adorable childhood version of each contestant. Her voice strained with faux gravitas, she addresses each contestant and asks:

If you could time-travel, what would you say to little Devon / Ricky / José / whatever name?

The contestants' answers are often touching, because for queer people to speak through time to our younger selves means to imagine ourselves before we were policed of our imagined deviance, before our wings were clipped. Unsurprisingly, contestants' voices catch, their faces dampen. After all, they are exhausted, and are now forced to reckon with a very literal externalisation of their inner child.

I struggle with it for a few reasons. Firstly, it's the kind of trope that is distinctly American - Drag Race is fairly irreverent, and only in the US would such a sharp detour into sentimentality still be expected to land on viewers as sincere. What's more, as seasons of the show have come and gone, contestants have caught on, and now meet Ru fully aware of their expected role, with the affected pathos that the moment demands. The whole thing now exists as a performative contemplation on the existence of queer trauma.

It is also, of course, inherently exploitative, though this critique feels like it holds less water when we have all tacitly endorsed this exploitation at a massive scale in the name of entertainment. In a world where 90 Day Fiancé or Dance Moms exists, this call and response feels like paddling in the shallow end of the problematic pool.

But it's neither of these things that bother me the most. It's the banality, the inutility of the question itself. Because I too have been asked this question many times in the context of my queerness. In the midst of an interview, in a Q&A after delivering a talk, in conversation. What would you say to little Alex?

Every time I seize up.

I sincerely believe that there's nothing I could possibly say to my younger self which would render his anguish any more manageable, any less ruinous. It feels important to me to sit in the truth of that, I'm not sure why. I could pull the little shape of him towards me, whisper into his ear a message of heartfelt advice, and still he would be spewed back out into a world that didn't understand him. At best I would say I'm really sorry, none of this is your fault, and try to absolve him of some future sense of responsibility. But he'd feel it all the same.

I guess I struggle with the desire to engage in a hypothetical that ultimately, in my opinion, would never lead to an alternate outcome. But I get why we keep asking it of each other. Queer people are united by our difference, and often by the suffering of experiencing our difference in a hostile context. As people who have suffered we are handed the uncomfortable task of finding ways to co-exist with the fact of our suffering, to make amends with it, to metabolise it somehow. To imagine a scenario where we go back and speak to our childhood self, warn him of what's to come, arm him more adequately, means briefly imagining a world where the system of oppression we are pinned under somehow wounds us less. In this fantasy we unburden ourselves and for an exquisite moment the enormous weight of our healing suspends itself in the air. I get it. The exercise is not to be taken literally, it's a bid for relief. Maybe I ought to stop yucking other queer people's yums.

But I dunno. I too have spoken to my inner child, and I always run out of things to say. I have no lack of compassion for my younger self, but I long ago accepted the inevitability of his particular suffering, so much so that I no longer resent it. It is a part of me I cannot change, I would barely recognise myself without it. I have drawn strength from the process of emerging out of it, rebuilding and magicking myself anew. My relief exists in the joy of my reinvention.

I do see, however, the utility in drawing up a conversation with someone in the imagined past. I just think we've all undershot the mark. Why speak to an imagined version of ourselves when the collective intelligence of the queer people of the past has been speaking to us this whole time, if only we would tune our ears to their frequency?

I have learnt to become myself through the existence of all the queer people who came before me, most of whose lives ended before I came into my own. I have looked behind, towards an imagined lineage, and there I have found ancestors, queer ancestors who I am tied to not through blood, but through the twin mirrors of our shared suffering and our emergence from it. Some of these people I can name, as they have left a trail of stories behind, but most I cannot, and so I imagine.

I imagine some of them as deep in a counter-cultural community, organising, finding novel ways to cherish each other, and I imagine others as profoundly lonely. I imagine that many spoke things out into their worlds that would not be listened to, let alone codified and passed on, and I imagine others found kinship, admiration, celebrity in the expression of their difference. I imagine some took pleasure in dreaming up the existence of someone like me, exercising my brochure of freedoms. I imagine many didn't have the stomach to dream beyond the cessation of their immediate hardship.

Remembering that these people existed en masse, contemplating the endless details of their unknowable lives and conversing with them through their art, is the closest I have come to a genuinely healing time travel. Here I find even more relief, to know that everything I've felt has been felt before, to know I was born in the image of many others, that a torch was gently passed along to me and now I am feeling the weight of it in my grateful hands.

The question I really want to answer, the question I wish we asked ourselves instead, is What have your queer ancestors spoken to you through time? And were you to ask me, you would see me negotiate tears, you would see a smile take hold of my face and I would answer:

They have told me to be patient, that the shame dissipates at the rate that it was accrued, if I will let it. They have told me that queerness is an action, an experience in motion that requires congregation and moving in forward propulsion together. They have told me to dare to take root in others, to reach into the empty space I am managing around myself, to hold and allow myself to be held. They have told me that love is a privilege, and one should not be aloof to the pleasure of its easy articulation. They have told me that we are at our best when we are the least prone to categorisation of each other, when we are willing to conceptualise ourselves as a complex, interlocking bloc.

And they have taught me that jammed between the words of any given answer is the prospect of another question, another way of tilting the world on its axis and provoking it into something better.

So I ask - what have they taught you?

A quick aside here to say this newsletter now numbers over 1000 subscribers - and if you're reading this from your inbox that includes you! So thank you for reading, as always. I also want to shout-out a new paid subscriber, David. In such economically fraught times, I am particularly touched by paid subscriptions, so thank you for your support. It means a lot.

After I wrote this piece I came across this brilliant James Baldwin quote, someone I would undoubtedly count as a queer ancestor. I laughed out loud when I read it, because in this piece I am explaining how everything we've felt or thought has usually been experienced, and if we're lucky, articulated by one of our ancestors before us. Here, as this Baldwin quote shows, that even includes the phenomenon itself! So I'll leave you in his capable hands.

“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.” — James Baldwin

Hello internet friends,

I have disappeared for a month, for the longest time since I started writing this newsletter. Hello again. I am swallowing the instinct to apologise - I'm never quite sure what the contract is between us, if there is one at all. Either way I'm happy to be writing publicly again, my journal is groaning from overuse.

I haven't been busy in the traditional sense, in fact I've been living at an enviably slow pace. There've been many drawn-out iced coffees with a book wedged open, much aimless trailing around the city of Sydney in the sticky sun. I've worked just enough to cover rent. I've spent a lot of time deep in the joys of intimate conversation; in throngs of sweaty queers in the crook of a purple nightclub; swimming with the little critters of the ocean. I've taken deep, intentional breaths. I've had time to listen to what my body has wanted, and for once I've given it freely. To observe me from afar, you would conjure the image of someone wholly engaged in his own self-actualisation. Alas, not quite.

I haven't been busy, but I have been preoccupied. I have woken up every day with a head full of unanswered questions and have been trying to coax them out, to see what they reveal to me, if they're up for being answered. For those of you following along, you can see me negotiating with these questions in previous posts. I've written about how to make decisions, about understanding my sense of place, about returning home after ten years to somewhere I escaped. Despite having followed all these thoughts through to what I assumed were their logical endpoints, the emotional quagmire of what is home and where is it for me has remained. In a way I'm not surprised, I often write to make sense of my world, but to make sense, to make meaning, is really to just project a layer of abstraction. Things do not exist for us to make sense of them. They just exist. They are there to be experienced.

Hence the silence. I have been experiencing, without a particular objective, chewing on the quiet hope that living will provide its own answers eventually.

As I sit in my Lisbon flat now, the last dregs of winter receding, I feel the familiar tug of being split into striations, of being stretched taut between multiple places at once, without a centre. In truth, I miss having a centre, and having spent so many formative years between so many locations, I often wonder if that centre will ever return, or if the choices I've made mean I'm bound to navigate life without it. Perhaps this is the trade-off for moving so much, you lose and re-find yourself, but you never fit snugly in any one place again? Maybe the centre doesn't fasten itself to a place, but exists within me? Maybe I am my own home, and the places around me are a set piece?

But here I go trying to make sense of things again.

I don't have an essay for you this week, but I have a story to tell, about my last weekend in Australia, the weekend of Mardi Gras (Sydney's name for Pride). I am sharing it without having made meaning from it yet, knowing that buried somewhere within it is a meditation on home, on belonging, or trying to. I am sharing it also because it's bursting out of me, thick with joy and appreciation and longing and nostalgia for the summer I've just left behind.

I hope you will indulge me.

I approach Pride season with a workman-like quality – efficient, methodical, pragmatic. It's a hangover from years working in the LGBTQ+ sector, where each Pride came with an avalanche of interest and extraction, corporations and institutions suddenly eager to borrow our magic. I spent many years in London hurtling through the season in a cloud of stress, following a project plan, my enjoyment of it a small, orbital figure on the periphery. I did not feel proud throughout, I felt proud at its completion, when I'd ticked the tasks off my dizzying list. That was my “pride”.

So, as Mardi Gras in Sydney comes into view this year I find myself cracking open a fresh spreadsheet and looking over the whole business of it with a meticulousness I seem to only access in moments of acute panic. This is subconscious, strategic. I want badly to arm myself with responsibilities because the alternative is confronting, that I'd dare to enjoy it, to take pleasure in gay Christmas, to just soak it up.

Why would a week of queer culture and nightlife strike me as anything but enjoyable? Well, my most formative and awkward memories of attempting to engage with a queer community exist in Sydney, and I cannot help but relive them when I'm back. The first time I went to a gay club with some encouraging straight friends, I had a panic attack on the way home. In trying to make more queer friends, I once volunteered with a sexual health charity, only to turn up to an event and be told to strip down to my underwear, as I'd been tasked with giving out free condoms to handsy, drunk older gays, a prospect which terrified me. A string of stunted, adolescent dates; uncomfortable, shame-laden sex, all of it existed in Sydney before I instinctively gathered my things and left in my early 20s. To re-engage in community in this place means, for me, to dredge up these stories of the past and find a new path through them. It is not simple work.

At some point in the week of celebrations, though, I let go. I give myself up to the tide, floating through the days that melt into nights and back into days and landing wherever friends corral me. I cackle through an immersive dramatisation of the David's Dead meme from Celebrity Big Brother UK in a hotel lobby, I strip down to my underwear (this time willingly) and swing from friend to stranger in a club as brain-dead house music drones in the space between us, I posture thoughtfully as I weigh up queer performance art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I watch myself act out enjoyment, then relax into it, become it. My spreadsheet remains unpopulated.

The spiritual apex of Mardi Gras is the Saturday, the day of the parade. It's when all the events stack on top of each other and become a ladder you happily scale. I gather that the done thing, at least among my friends, is to line up three parties, one for each temporal phase of the festivity: lunchtime to late afternoon, late afternoon to evening, and late evening to morning. The parade, you see, is for tourists. Instead you careen from party to party, the sky bruises and the potential for debauchery increases exponentially. So too, usually, do the substances you take.

It is the third party where I hit my stride, where I imagine most do. Finding liberation in the confines of a nightclub has always struck me as an overwrought trope in the queer canon, and one that is not entirely accessible, but as I press my body into the inviting shapes of others, I feel my edges expanding, like my joy is bleeding into theirs. I am high. The sweat ribbons out of me and it feels like crying, in the way that one cries when flooded with relief, or when stilled by a thing of unimaginable beauty. I punch the air and smile as me and my shifting troupe of friends, some of whom are functionally strangers, find new and careful ways to look after each other. Circling back with cups of water, taking each other outside for happy gasps of air, sweeping each other up into dance. I understand, possibly for the first time, that here there is communion, freedom. That every joyful movement a queer person makes in a world that is trying to break us produces a miraculous light. I am glowing in the dark.

It is in the midst of this, in the blue hours of mid-morning, that a friend introduces me to a boy. “Have you two met?” he half-asks, before mincing off into the crowd, and the two of us regard each other unsure if we have but knowing we are about to. We speak only briefly before descending into kissing, such is the vibe. The room heaves around us and we grin dumbly at each other before escaping out onto the street to buy provisions to keep us dancing (in this instance, coconut water and gum). Huddled together on the curb, touching with the ease of lovers, we tell stories of ourselves to each other, letting our sweat dry into a thin film along our naked backs. “I think we are dancefloor boyfriends now”, I offer, and he nods in tacit agreement. Re-entering the club we will pursue our own adventures, but will reunite when the night comes to a close. It is agreed. We sign the pact with a kiss.

When the club finally kicks us all out, the boy and I have already found each other, and our friends have concocted a plan to watch the sunrise at a local beach. Soon we are in a taxi, and within moments we've burst out of the masses of concrete and are speeding along the water's edge watching as the moon and sun begin their slow ritual of transition. We tumble out into a small bay, peeling off the scant clothes we still have on in the waning dark and rushing into an ocean that feels warmer than usual, a trick of physiology aided by the particular cocktail of drugs coursing through us. I'm up to my neck in it when I hear a small yelp, the friend who'd introduced the boy to me staring down at his rippling reflection.

“Are we really high or is…”

He sweeps his hand through the water and the tips of his fingers leave a trail of fiery blue, little spasms of colour that slink away as soon as they have appeared. For a couple of beats we are all silently taking in air together, before we begin one after the other to cast our bodies out into different shapes, painting momentary portraits in the ocean with our limbs.

“Bioluminescence”, the boy says to himself and to us all, and I think I might cry.

I think about how recently I was stopped in my tracks by a cast of bats swerving above my head, leaping across the last wisps of light at the precipice of dusk.

I think about having watched the unfurling of a brooding storm across the bay, the clouds shimmering with the promise of lightning, the birds a firework as they scattered to shelter in their city of trees.

I think of swimming in an ocean pool with a friend and encountering a bad-tempered octopus in a small cavern, who blasted us with plumes of ink that hung thick in the salty water.

I think of all the moments loud and quiet that this land, Gadigal land, has called out to me, asked me to reconcile with it, to love it again, and how obstinate I have been in response, how resistant to making amends.

And as I paddle further out, breaking away from the group, I think most of all of the wisdom of a new friend, who, upon hearing me list all the stories I'd told myself about this city, about my lack of home within it, said simply: more than anything you belong to this land, not to the people who stole it and made a nation state out of it. Return to it. Find your home in that.

I steady myself and dive down through the black water towards the earth beneath it, towards my old and new home. Submerged, I blink my eyes open and the flickers of cyan erupt around me in chorus, a welcome, a celebration, a homecoming.

For the second time in this glorious, tender evening, I am glowing in the dark.

How do decisions come to you?

I'm not talking about which non-dairy milk you'll have in your latte. I'm talking hulking, arrogant decisions, decisions that feel that they're wrenching you towards an unseen path, moving forward the intrigue of your little life.

Mine arrive first, slyly, as questions. Will I move back to my hometown? Am I going to change careers? Am I going to make this person my boyfriend? They orbit my head with the subtlety of big cartoon stars, finding ways to elbow into every thought, every conversation. My mind no longer wanders, but walks impatiently to these questions, and sits there, an expectant dog.

After the theatre of announcing themselves and receiving no response, these questions linger, and I come to know them as curious co-inhabitants in the house of my life. I calmly make space for them at the dinner table, on the adjacent pillow before I curl up to sleep. They ask themselves incessantly, and I regard them with weariness. Don't fuck with me, I say, and they pause dumbly before asking themselves all over again.

I manage to live peacefully with these questions because questions have no inherent power. They are an attempt at a provocation, not a provocation assured. We are accustomed to moving through life in a mist of unanswered questions. What if this, how come that. A question is an idea on auction, and we have the ultimate say on whether we'll make a bid.

With a question that hides a decision, though, you must bid eventually. And bid I do. I low-ball at first. I half-answer and see if it will scuttle off.

For example, in the question Will I move back to my hometown?, I will offer up the answer Maybe, let's see how I feel later this year and then death-stare the question in a performance of intimidation. This is simply a ritual; me and the question both know it won't slink away. But if you don't partake in the ritual you are not connected to a sense of caution, you are hurtling towards something with abandon. The ritual is an insurance.

Because then something subtle but important happens. After this exchange, the question re-arranges its insides, shuffles its component parts and presents itself anew. It shifts from:

Will I move back to my hometown?

to

I will move back to my hometown?

This is really fucking sneaky, and I resent the cleverness of it. It's a statement trying on a question and it echoes differently in the psyche. French and Portuguese and other Romance languages form questions like this by default, and god knows why because there's nothing romantic about curtailing open-endedness so violently. It's a cheap parlour trick.

Yes, I am being critical here, and it's because it's in this stage of decision-making where I experience the most friction, the most inertia. In changing the terms of the question, you can no longer give a half-answer but instead have to gather yourself and engage with it more assertively. The I will places a quiet demand on you, that you do away with vagueness, so by the time you've reached the question mark you're only really met with half the relief you were expecting. You're forced to approach the whole business with more gusto. It sucks.

And yet I always luxuriate in this stage because:

a) I am the kind of person who finds comfort in avoidance, and

b) this is the last time you can taste the glorious elixir of indecision.

I can sit for years in this purgatory and let it wash over me, busy myself with the unimportant practicalities of my life and let this newly worded question-statement bloat and grow and colonise all the spaces in me that are still vacant. I take pleasure in the indecision as a quiet form of resistance to the propulsive tendencies of the mind. I say, no, not just yet, let me stretch out like a cat in the unknown of this, before time hurries me forward as it always does.

Then, somehow, without warning, thoughts fortify into words and fly out of my treacherous mouth. I mention the possibility of a move back to my hometown in the familiar rhythm of a conversation with a friend, surprising myself. Soon I am testing how it feels to say it out loud, how it ricochets through the hallway of my body, if I can say it and believe the veracity of what I say. I start to throw meat onto the bones of the idea, an idea that I have now placed a winning bid on, the auctioneer smirking as they switch off the lights. Slowly, exquisitely, the question mark falls away and distils into a full stop. The Americans call this punctuation mark a period, which I like, because it signals the end of one. I will move back to my hometown.

The next bit you already know. You metabolise the decision and it becomes a part of you, it creates a new chapter heading and you furiously write whatever comes next. Soon you are living an action that started off as a thought and are now fielding a new cabal of questions with their own decision shadows, ones you hadn't conceived, ones that will cycle through the process all over again. Life canters on.

This is how decisions come to me. How do they come to you? Perhaps it is different.

A flatmate once told me that her decisions come to her like mystic revelations, that they travel up from somewhere cavernous and unreachable inside her and propel themselves out with uncontainable force. She woke me up one morning and told me she was quitting her job, and then walked out the door and did so. It was like watching a miracle.

I found myself envying it. That without her knowledge the decision had lived within her and one day pounced and that she was just along for the ride, doing its urgent bidding.

I have titled this How to make a decision, but I don't really think we make decisions, not when they are this big. I think they make us. I think we wrestle with them under the guise of equal footing, when really the decision has already been made deep within our recesses before it even presents itself as an initial question. I think decisions exist in the realm of intuition, a realm we are so trained out of inhabiting that instead we engage in the theatre of weighing up possibilities, as if we can bend the rules of the world to our whims. When people tell you to flip a coin to make a decision, and to observe in yourself what you're hoping the result will be as it whirs in the air, they are speaking to this quiet part of us that is deeply knowing, that already knows. I wish we were more tender with it. I wish we spoke to it more. Perhaps the business of decision-making would be less agonising.

I do not consider myself spiritual, I believe in little that I can't see around me. But of the lessons life has taught me, there's one that I hold tightly to me like a sermon.

You can try to happen to life, but more often than not, life happens to you. So let go. Find the decision burrowed within you and let it articulate itself through you. Unclench your grip, let it arrive in its own time.

It was never something you had to retrieve. It was just waiting for you to catch up.

Thanks for reading, as always. This week I wanted to share some things I've been reading / consuming. I'm not sure if I'll make a habit out of this but I really enjoy curated recommendations from other newsletters I subscribe to so I'm dipping my toe in these waters. Let me know if this is something you enjoy (or not!).

What I am reading:

This week I finished V.V. Ganeshananthan's Brotherless Night, a sweeping novel told from the point of view of a young Tamil woman in Sri Lanka during the anti-Tamil pogroms of the 1980s and the subsequent war between the government and the Tamil Tigers. I have to show my cards and say that I am half Tamil, and so this story finds a particularly empathetic home in me, but even so, I will say that it was one of the most singular and devastating books I have read a really long time. It portrays the brutality of genocide in an unfussy, sobering way. More here in my (gushing) Goodreads review.

On Substack, I enjoyed:

• This essay from Tommy Misa, an ode to twinks and the femininity they incarnate, to self-containment, to growth. It's also funny.

• Do we really want more male vulnerability in fiction? I didn't entirely agree with this piece by Andrew Boryga (why does queer male interiority not count?) but it was thought-provoking, and yet another reminder of the fact that the publishing industry is a curatorial force with biases like any other.

• bodies of pleasure by natesha somasundaram is as beautiful as it is sprawling, a meditation of grief set against the backdrop of sweltering Sydney summer.

• My friend Yassmin Abdel-Magied on why she writes (to see the world, or improve it?) and on being indispensable.

What I am listening to / watching:

I have been demolishing Ezra Klein's interviews since his Vox days and this one about the Big Tech divide within the MAGA movement in the US shed a lot of light for me on this new, bizarre political coalition between neo-nazis and tech bros. In particular their discussion on the role of masculinity in this movement was fascinating.

Oh, and before I forget: abracadabra amor ooh na na, abracadabra morta ooh gaga. Periodt.

Until next time!

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I am on a dating-app-date, which is another way of saying that I am killing time meeting a stranger who, based on his digital media footprint, I think I have a non-zero chance of being attracted to. It's coffee, appropriately non-committal for us both. We had barely exchanged hellos on the app before we realised we were in the same part of the city and shared a swathe of unstructured time this afternoon. We've both spun the wheel.

When he arrives I know immediately, as one often does, that my attraction to this man hovers at an unpromising mid-point. But, ever the romantic, I always maintain that you're only ever one conversation away from falling in love. We trade plot points of our lives. He grew up somewhere else, I grew up here. He's fairly new to the city, I left it and am back visiting. We go on and he flashes me an otherwise lovely smile and I privately concede that this is not the falling in love conversation, that at best this is the half-heartedly promise to meet again and instead end up liking each other's Instagram stories in perpetuity conversation. Or that maybe this isn't a conversation at all, but two people involved in a kind of commerce, buying time to stave off loneliness in a cultural moment that’s so thick with it.

We end up going for a wander and the city is stormy, the air is furious and the wind does the walking for us. At a pedestrian crossing I turn to him and am met with his mouth, and so we are kissing, which I receive more than give, but don't retreat from. We decide to go back to mine. The storm, we say in chorus, we should shelter from the storm.

I don’t remember how it comes up. I’ve been retracing the patter of the conversation to figure out if a mischievous part of me set him up, pushing him to reveal something that my body already simmered with the knowledge of. We are sat on the couch with matching glasses of water and he says, confessionally:

“So I have a type.”

A silent alarm sweeps through me but I stifle it. I smile.

“Oh?”

“I like the ethnic boys” he says, tracing his eyes up from my chest. “Like, I love a habibi, a spicy latino…even an Asian. I've just never been into Australian guys”.

My smile slips off.

I feel a familiar collapse, and my brain busies itself with its new work. It does a rapid-fire calculation as it has done many times before: regulates my expression to a practiced neutrality, considers what I have the energy for today, surveys the space we are in and notes the exits. I have released myself from whatever contract was forming between me and this man, but I will not let him know it, not yet.

The luxurious heat of anger that would arrive in someone less accustomed has long been extinguished.

The conversation that follows is stunted. I confess discomfort, he is surprised, teetering on offended. But I am expecting this, so I am generous, too generous, and engage him in a light psychoanalysis, probing where this preference might have come from. He bats away the question, almost laughing at the idea that something so base could have an internal logic. I don't accuse him of anything except a lack of curiosity, but even this creates tension, and he handles me with a mounting impatience. We don't touch our waters.

When he finally leaves, at my gentle request, I sit in the stillness of the apartment and pick at the knot in my head. Outside, the weather has muddled, a soft rain barely pricking the windows.

No more white men, I think.

In early 2020, before the cataclysm which tilted the next few years onto their edge, I went viral. Like, super fucking viral. I was a prolific Twitter person at the time, a full convert to the religion of the hot take, and had found a small community and subsequent following among queer over-thinker and social justice types. I had a demanding job as a campaigner at a queer human rights NGO – Twitter was an escape I allowed because I could justify it as vaguely drawing attention to our work. And that's what I did, mostly, until all of a sudden I was micro-blogging my thoughts into the void alongside everyone else.

What I went viral for and why is the subject of its own story. But all you need to know is that it was for a series of tweets about my reflections on the particular experience of growing up queer, which a lot of people related to. It was also the most overwhelming experience of my life, so much so that talking about it still feels irksome and somewhat gauche.

After the first week of viral mania, I became aware that the relatively anonymous experience of Twitter I had come to know and enjoy was now dead. A spotlight had swivelled over and locked onto me. The internet was hailing me as a prophet, as worthy of an audience, which it bestowed upon me expectantly. What else did I think of queer life? What other wisdom did I have to share? All of a sudden it became very important what I said next.

And so I went silent. Not from stage fright, or strategy. It was just hard to find any words, especially as the pandemic emerged from behind and sucked all the air out of our lives. Everything that wasn’t COVID suddenly seemed inane.

It wasn't until the murder of George Floyd, the catalysing event that it was, that I knew what else had been fomenting inside me. With an unexpected conversation about racism exploding across the world, I realised I wanted to talk about something I had never really been able to stare in the face, for fear of what it would speak back to me. I wanted to talk about racism, yes, but I wanted to talk about the underbelly of it, the furtive ways that it played out in desire, in attraction, in romance. I wanted to talk about sexual racism.

I pulled together an infographic1 and pressed publish.

Half a week later I was filing a police report in response to a worryingly specific death threat I'd received on Twitter. I handed out the passwords of my various social media accounts to close friends who mass-deleted the most egregious of the comments that were now footnotes across my entire online presence. My personal email leaked and I woke up to hundreds of emails detailing how sick I was, how brainless I must be, for posting something so counter-factual, so anti-white, so breathtakingly stupid. An alt-right YouTuber even made an entire video debunking the concept of sexual racism and reiterating the superior attractiveness of the white race, using a thirst-trap of me as the thumbnail (credit where credit is due, as far as creative racism goes, it was genius).

To this day I don't really know the mechanics of what happened, just that my reach was so large that my “content” could now make its way to corners of the internet I had not charted, populated with people who were politically hostile and well co-ordinated. I had gone viral once again, but this time I was the object of internet ire rather than admiration. It was in many ways a level of negative attention that was inconceivable.

So why was I not surprised?

I dislike the term sexual racism in that it's not fit-for-purpose. Defining this particular form of racism as sexual essentialises it, focuses it in on sex, when in reality it's more expansive. Really, sexual racism should be named "attraction-based racism” or something similar in order to capture everything that comes under it - the romantic, the erotic, the relational and yes, the sexual.

When I think of sexual racism I think of two slightly competing phenomena. The first is the intellectual idea of it, that people have racial biases that inform their sexual and romantic interests, crafted by a world that has fed them restrictive ideas about what can and should be considered attractive. White people ruling Black people out as a dating or sexual prospect, for example, is a form of sexual racism. This has been studied and exists as an observable experience. It is a verifiably real thing. Nevertheless, it is obscured in a fog of controversy, in part because studying these things is both hard (race is a cultural construct, attraction is an imprecise science) and uncomfortable.

And then, alongside it is the felt-sense of it. This I know. The experience of growing up in a white world and it slowly dawning on you that you exist in a separate category from your peers when it comes to being an object of desire, that you are the human equivalent of selecting the box “Other” on a drop-down list. The dissonance of being over-sexualised as exotic by a select few while desexualised by a spate of others. The second guessing of someone's attraction to you, for fear that at its root is a fetish, conscious or not. Moving through different cultural contexts and seeing how you are received differently, as totally invisible (for me, Nordic countries) or as suddenly a part of the fabric of what is considered default attractive (for me, Latin America).

I have had many conversations in good faith with the white people in my life about sexual racism as an intellectual phenomenon, and for the most part they will concede that it's something they recognise the possibility of in themselves. Even if they feel dubious about it, at the very least that they can sign up to the logic that attraction is complex, and that they are not immune from the messages transmitted to them by a white supremacist culture that deifies beauty standards anchored in European ideals.

They can accept it in theory.

In practice, though, I see how deeply the conditioning sits within them. When I've softly pointed out racial trends in a white friend's selection of partners, whether it be excluding marginalised races or chronically chasing them, I am met with intense, convulsive resistance. Many years ago a friend of mine flew off the handle when I revealed to him how jarring it was for me to hear him say he’d “discovered” Black men and would now be pursuing them exclusively.

So it was racist when I didn't want to fuck them and now it's racist when I want to fuck them?

Touché, I thought, though the answer that burned within me was an unequivocal yes.

Attraction is personal. Feeling those initial glimmers of desire towards another human being for the first time is often an experience encountered awkwardly, in formative, hormonal years. It's exciting, special, tinged in shame - this is the first glance we get into the world of the erotic, which beckons us like a door just slightly ajar. Come in, it says, but come in quietly, privately. The whole business is shrouded in a kind of mystique. We hold it closely.

Through our experiences we come to learn that desiring someone else is not only special, but deeply-rooted in us, animal. Desire roils in the pit of our stomachs, the heat of our cheeks, the engorging of our appendages. Who we are attracted to and why is an exercise of the body and animal brain, it sits alongside breathing and sleeping and shitting, an intractable instinct. We draw it up as patently unintellectual, telling ourselves that sex and desire are places we can go without being bogged down by the critiques and considerations that come with taking part in the social order. In desire we construct an illusion of freedom.

Like all illusions we hold dear, when they are meddled with, we panic. The truth is that our desires are not a sacred thing we hold private dominion over, but a currency we have simply bought into and are busy trading. Around us exists a market, and we are swept up in market trends that came into being long before our exposure to them. With some biologically-driven exceptions2, a lot of what we are attracted to has been drip-fed to us over a lifetime, sitting on the edge of our consciousness.

When someone dares to point out that desire is not a neutral, intrinsic force, that it exists within a societal context, and that discriminatory racial preferences can stem from there, people get prickly and defensive, like my date. When someone points that out to thousands of people all at once, in a gaudy set of slides, people send them death threats. So unthinkable, so violent is the idea that even our most base desires could be examined for flickers of prejudice.

After the fallout of my infographic debacle, I spoke very rarely on sexual racism again, at least publicly. I was already aware of the dynamic I was engaged in - this brand of racism felt massive and urgent to me because I lived in the reality of it. Most of the white people around me weren't ready to give up their illusion.

So I cocooned. I stopped dating white men, because this felt like an easy safeguard. I worked on unravelling my own internalised racism, and created strong boundaries in my erotic life that kept me from weathering the brunt of the sexual politics of race, a politics I did not invent but could not escape. I restricted my pool of suitors, and it worked beautifully.

And yet. One thing I know to be true is that when you wind yourself up into a defensive stance, you see attacks everywhere. My therapist had more than once quietly suggested that by ruling white men out entirely, I'd risk never challenging the narrative that there were some out there who desired me authentically, not as an extension of a fetish. Didn't I want to find out? Didn't I want to prove myself wrong?

It's the weekend and I take myself out for a night of dancing. Sydney gay nightlife leaves a lot to be desired, and I know at one point I will find myself in a crowd of shirtless white men with matching, pristine bodies, but I go anyway. I have oiled my skin this evening and as the night stretches on I throw off my shirt, defiant. My body catches the light, warms the pale men around me. I am slick. I am luminous.

The dance floor congests and I slither through to the bar area, pour myself a plastic cup of water and make eyes at a man standing across from me. He's taller than me, braids pulled back tight, one of the few dark-skinned men I've seen at the club. He makes eyes back and we talk briefly, about the smallness of this city, this country, how it never seems to quite make room for us. Soon we are kissing, because it's a gay club, because it's nearing midnight, because we want to.

He pulls back and regards me conspiratorially, gestures to the sea of white men behind us.

“You know you're the hottest guy here".

"No, I think you are.”

And it's hard not to smile. Because yes, it's an exchange of drunken compliments, cheesy ones. But what sits silent between the words is a mutual acknowledgement that outside the knot of our glistening brown bodies in this dark corner of the club, there's a world out there that has persuaded us both, at different times and to different degrees, that we will always be relegated to the background in the moving pictures of desire. In these compliments, we foreground each other, recast ourselves as main characters.

We shimmer together, engaged in our private fantasy of being centred. We say it to each other and we believe it.

I lean in and kiss him harder.

A big hello to my new subscribers. I couldn't be more happy that you're here. Thank you for reading and joining this experiment. I'd also like to shout-out my two new paid subscribers, Guy and Alexander (no relation, hehe) - I am blown away by your generosity. Thank you for supporting my work.

As always your comments, shares and forwards help get Post-Pride to others, and so are super appreciated. I'll be back in your inbox in a fortnight.

Hello from the place I grew up.

The sentence reads as inane, but my guts are in my mouth as I write it. But then, I guess not everyone feels the urge to escape the place where they were made. Not everyone finds coming home so bewildering.

In the weeks since I arrived, I've observed scores of my fellow citizens acting out their routines unremarkably, and sensed in myself an inexplicable, mounting panic. People jog past me, chat with friends at coffee spots, zip to and from work, and I realise that there's a deep, fiendishly wounded part of me that wants to scream:

Do you know what it was like for me to grow up in this place that you are so lavishly enjoying? Do you know that I moved my entire life to another continent in order to feel that I had room to exist? Do you know how good you have it, that you grew up here feeling that this place was designed with you in mind?

Phew. Intense, no? Very main character energy. Of course, this is a complicated knot of projections; such hostility towards my fellow city-goers is profoundly unfair. Being back here makes me anxious, and there are clearly some hurts to be healed.

And lately I've been pondering this healing, the mechanics of it, what steps I'd need to take to ensure the simple act of being back in the place I grew up doesn't intermittently flood my nervous system with dread. So I have thought big thoughts, journalled, and roped various friends into weighing in on my woes. And the question I've been left with has arrested me.

If you run away from home, can you really heal from afar? Or does the healing only happen in the homecoming?

I grew up in the Northern Beaches of Sydney. These are the most north-eastern suburbs, existing almost as their own enclave, and as they stretch further north the beaches become more spectacular, the people become wealthier, and everyone is really fucking white. It is an upmarket, upper-middle class area, and many people who live there feel no need to stray from it - I remember a schoolmate of mine proudly sharing that he'd crossed the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which connects the two halves of the city, only once. If it helps you visually, the soap Home and Away is filmed there, and perfectly captures the aesthetics of the place. It also has the lowest rate of obesity, not just in the city, but in the entire country. Go figure.

My parents, both immigrants, settled in the lower, inner part, which was largely more affordable, and far from any beach, albeit still patently middle class. I got myself a scholarship to a fancy private school where I rubbed shoulders with kids who had experienced an unimaginable level of privilege. Their fathers were inattentive, C-Suite types, their mothers engaged in the strenuous labour of maintaining their rich white lady glamour. Speaking of whiteness, there were few kids of colour in my grade, a smattering of international students, myself, and one or two others. We were all so intensely concerned with the urgency of our assimilation that there was no sense of solidarity between us, I'm not sure we could have even conceived of a thing. No student in my time at the school ever came out as queer, in fact gay bashings were not an uncommon occurrence in the area. I was also the fattest kid in the school for a good portion of my time there.

To that particular school in that particular part of the city at that particular time, I was an emblem of some of the least understood and least desirable aspects of being human. And this is how I was treated, in the way that you're probably imagining, by students and, less nakedly, by staff. It wasn't always awful - I was handled with as much curiosity as I was contempt. There were moments of staggering brutality, and moments of welcome reprieve. It was, though, consistently very lonely.

The memory of this experience, and the traces it left within my body and psyche, was what I escaped when I decided to leave Australia in my early 20s. At the time, I dreamt up a story about a big adventure. But really, I was fleeing with abandon. I needed room to breathe, a place that was not so humid with the spectres of my youth. I needed to put myself back together, away from the threat of dissection.

And so I did. And since then, a decade and two other countries I've called home have whooshed past. In many ways, the Great Escape™ has been a roaring success. I stepped into the space I granted myself, I found people whose experiences mirrored mine (many of them also taking refuge from the stories foisted upon them which they had no choice but to metabolise) and I felt the cleansing wash of kinship, of another family, of community. I fought hard to find some resolution to the distress that had marked me, to chew through the gristle of the worst of it. I began to heal.

But for many years, when I returned to Sydney to see family and treasured friends, I couldn't help but interact with the city in a disordered way. I sought out a continuation of the narrative I'd scaffolded - that my retreat was justified by the inherent hostility of this city and its residents to me, to people like me. I walked around the streets blind to the fact of whatever was happening around me, transfixed by my own sumptuous fiction, seeing a caricature of the city forged by my suffering within it. I had been healing away from my pain, not towards it. And now, any step back into the home that had betrayed me felt completely obliterating.

When I first read Jenny Odell's essay collection How To Do Nothing, I felt something shift in me. To this day I quote it constantly, in fact I'm sure my friends stifle an eye-roll every time I find an excuse to bring it up. The book is about the attention economy, listing out the nefarious ways our digital technology seeks to capitalise on our attention, and her various strategies to harness and direct her attention to the places she wants, rather than the places said technology demands.

In the book, Odell talks about the impossibility of retreat when it comes to these new technologies, that to give up, say, social media at a time when it's become so baked into the fabric of our world, often comes at a cost that one can't always afford. Instead, she advocates for a kind of refusal-in-place, to partake and be present in these attention-demanding contexts while simultaneously refusing to play by their dictated rules. She suggests that when it comes to these technologies, not retreating, but instead staying put and reclaiming your agency, is an important form of resistance.

The first time I read this I instinctively transposed what Odell was saying into the context of my life. The simple idea that one could resist an oppressive digital or physical environment through mindful, intentional presence, rather than rush to escape, floored me. Escape was what I always did when things were closing in, I escaped into books, escaped into my imagination. In the end, I escaped to a different country. What if in my life I had instead refused-in-place?

When I think of the anguished child who left Australia a decade ago, I see that all he knew, all he had within him, was escape. I would not be the person I am today, a person who I feel a lot of affection and tenderness for, had I stayed. I do not think I could have made the rules of the place I suffered in bend to my will. Even if I'd had the imagination for it, I'm sure I would have crumbled in the effort.

But I am not that child anymore. Ten years on, I walk this city as a visitor and see that there is the opportunity for me to redraw the narrative I have hung upon it all of these years. I am enticed by the pockets of queer resistance across the city that I see bubbling up. I see an observable increase in the visibility of Black and brown people on screens, in elected office, around me, even if it still feels like it's not enough, like this country is lagging behind. And there are other considerations. The new babies of my loved ones are proliferating, my parents are getting older - the years are beginning to distend with more meaning, and generations are turning over. The more I am away, the more I miss.

But above all, how heartbreaking it would be for one's life to be a series of withdrawals, of movements away from a foundational hurt. I have been running away from home, and I have not stopped to take a breath, because to stop would mean to take in the enormity of what I'm running from, how exhausted I am, and how little ground I've really gained.

I have come to accept that the option to escape was inflicted upon me, because escape was my only chance of liberation, of rebuilding my life. But there is a difference between being moved to leave, and choosing it. There is a dignity, a luxury in choice.

I want to choose.

An old friend has just bought an apartment within walking distance from the beach, and I drive over to help him and his partner move in. My help consists mostly of watching them unpack boxes and playing with their infant daughter, who is radiant and captivating and meeting me for the first time. They wipe down surfaces and dress beds and I let her little fingers grasps the masts of mine. Eventually we all decide to wander down to the new beach on their doorstep, traipsing the hills of Sydney suburbia and setting up in a shady alcove under a sagging tree. I walk the sand towards the water and it's cold on my feet, despite the sun. Still, I rush into it, like I was taught, on the beaches I grew up on. I am dodging bluebottles and tufts of seaweed expertly, slipping over waves without thought, surveying the surrounding cliffs. I take an easy breath and slide under the surface of the water, let the air snake out until the bulk of my body sinks me down and I am adrift on the ocean floor, silent, relinquishing my movements to the tide. I have done this since I was a child, a little gospel to the ocean, my ultimate escape. When my lungs bristle with the effort, I plant my feet back underneath me and propel myself up like a piston, breaking through the summit of a wave that curls over before gently setting me down.

My eyes adjust and for the briefest of moments I see this place, this city, for what it is, unencumbered by the weight of my projections, traumas that have calcified into opinions. I see the miraculous sun and the people thrown out like freckles on the shore, and for a few seconds, I am not a fat, brown, queer body in a place that is trying to destroy me. I am simply a body in a place. And this place is beautiful. Even more for the fact that I am in it.

And when the moment passes, as it must, the salt water welling within me falls to join the salt water around me and a rigid, well-worn part of me unclasps, lets go of something that was held.

I am ready to stop running.

I am refusing in place.

Good morning from my little haven of sunshine. Lisbon has been gloriously sunny these last few weeks, even as the temperature has plummeted. I am notoriously sceptical about whether winter should even really exist, but I don't mind an ache of cold in my extremities if the sun is willing to show face.

I have been contemplating the weather this morning, because I have been contemplating my sense of place and purpose, and how the two intertwine. A job opportunity has emerged from nothingness this week and landed uncomfortably in my lap. Without divulging the details, the job is good, it ticks many of my boxes, it's handsomely paid, it's aligned with my values. And also, successfully getting the job would also probably require my relocation back to London, a city I spent eight years in and then ungraciously disavowed.

I have moved a lot, probably too much. There's a host of reasons why, a litany of narratives that I have spun about why I've moved and what it meant. What they all have in common is that at a certain time and place in my life, I've had a realisation that there is something I sorely need that the conditions of the place around me don't seem to be able to provide. I begin to make retrospective meaning about why I was in the city in the first place, start to see how as I've grown my perspective has shifted. And then, the city begins to feel cumbersome, I start to feel like I am partaking in it clumsily, my feet begin to drag, and I start to scan the horizon for somewhere else.

In Sydney, where I grew up, I realised that I needed to reinvent myself and that the environment around me (achingly white, lacking a genuinely liberated queer scene) wouldn't allow me to flourish in my difference. In London, where I spent most of my 20s, I realised that the pace and hustle of the city was making me lose my sense of self, and that I wasn't wired for long patches of life without the sun. In Lisbon, I think I am beginning to realise that I badly need to live in community, and that the community I am seeking is harder to find here.

All of these realisations are interesting, in that they confer a sense of responsibility onto the city, as if I am in dialogue with it and we should both be finding ways to come to a shared compromise. And yet, this is not how cities work. A city is not concerned about the story you want to place on it, it is concerned with its own self-perpetuation, it has no qualms in chewing you up and spitting you out. We project these narratives onto the places we live because we see them as containers of possibilities, and as our concept of what is possible in our life shifts, so does our sense of the suitability of our chosen container.

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I dutifully read Alan Downs’ The Velvet Rage in my early 20s as all middle class gay men at the time were wont to do. If you're unfamiliar, it's a seminal piece of gay self-help literature, which unpacks some of the basic psychological impacts of growing up gay and how they impact adult psychology. I tried to track down my copy while writing this piece, but realised I'd given it away a long time ago. For a time, it became a kind of token traded between gay men, I don't even think my original copy was my own.

I can't cite where it is in the book, but I distinctly remember Downs, a clinical psychologist, espousing that he'd seen a trend amongst his gay male patients of many of them being chronically on the go, migrating from city to city, state to state, bouncing around countries in fits of agitation. His diagnosis was that many gay men externalise their own dissatisfaction with themselves and project it onto the places they are. Their script is: I fundamentally don't accept or like myself here, so maybe here is the problem. Maybe if I go elsewhere I'll create the right conditions for self-love.

It's entirely possible that this has been a contributing narrative to the bouts of movement in my life, it certainly was when I first left Sydney. But I do wonder whether this externalisation of self-dissatisfaction is a phenomenon contained uniquely to gay men, or instead a symptom of our culture, that anyone who is striving for more in their life can fall into. In a world that is constantly telling us that the solution to resolving our ennui lies in the consumption of goods that exist outside us, why wouldn't we extend this thinking out to the external conditions we live within - perhaps we're just one more border-crossing from bliss?

It does beg the question, is our satisfaction with the place we live determined by the place itself or our capacity and willingness to radically imagine and create our own possibilities within it? Are places really containers or are they canvases upon which we get to scrawl whatever we like?

But then, even canvases have edges. I think like many things, the answer lies somewhere in the uncomfortable middle. Every place we could choose to live has an adjunct set of facts. This city is colder, this city is warmer. This city is more expensive, this city is more affordable. And then alongside those facts sit assumptions, projections. This city has more opportunities for me. That city is too intense. This city isn't my vibe. That city is friendlier.

It's in these projections that our stories live, and in these projections that our stories can also die. Our sense of a place is exactly that - sensorial. It's our flawed perception of an external stimulus, and its ultimately within our power to shift, if we feel like we have access to it. A place is a concept more than anything else, like so many quirks of human living it only has meaning because we have collectively hallucinated it so.

As for me, a potential return to London would mean a return to the stories I have made of it. And as we've seen depicted in art as far back as Odysseus returning to Ithaca, the return to a formative place after a time away does not land in the human psyche lightly. As someone who has spent so much time shrugging out of one place and stepping into one newer, the idea of peering behind my shoulder does fill me with a certain existential dread.

But perhaps being willing to contemplate the stories you've told yourself and do the labour of going back with an editor's eye and making a few foundational tweaks is the work of life? Perhaps we are always making meaning in one direction, stopping, pondering, and then making meaning in another. It's just whether we're brave enough to stare at the zig-zag behind us and see it for what it is - the folly of being human, of making the most of the little we know.

As always the answer probably lies in the doing. For now, I'm soon back to Sydney for the holiday season, the place where it all started, another place with its own stories.

I hope to see you again, with whatever new narratives we've both concocted for ourselves, in the new year. Thanks for being here.

I was an angry child. I threw tantrums frequently, so much so that my family speak of it now with a kind of ironic fondness, regaling anecdotes about the time my mum had to force me into a headlock to get me to brush my teeth because I had screamed refusal, or of the several times I wailed so loudly and violently that our neighbours inquired about my wellbeing. My family and I laugh about these moments now, probably because laughter feels like it signals healing, because laughter is a useful wash. But within these collective recollections sits my own memory of what was happening, less pointedly funny, the jagged edges worn down by the passing of time. I don't remember the plot points, the details of whatever ordeal I was facing. But I do remember the uncontainable, debilitating rage.

As an adult I am at pains to explain to everyone how badly I wear anger, how allergic I am to it. I am not very good at being angry, I say. It's a story I've told myself and so now tell others, and I can see why. Very rarely in my adult life do I raise my voice, or show up to confrontation in an explosive or aggressive way. Instead I usually cry, going inward rather than out. The meaning I have made from this is that I am just not that angry, that anger flows through me in a different way to others, that anger is hot and made of oil, and I am water, I repel it.

But that's not entirely true. When I really take a moment to disrupt the flow of my life and connect to my anger, it crawls up my legs and starts a fire within me that I am at pains to put out for fear it could consume me whole, that I would walk around the world aflame, yelping, shrieking. I have coped by letting my anger absorb into me, so much so that I now treat it as set dressing, as a banal hum in the background. I have contained it. When something happens in my life that might produce anger, the hum raises itself a vibration and I gently, instinctively turn it down, even if the act of doing so constitutes a kind of psychic self-harm.

The reasons behind my anger are numerous and largely ambiguous. Anger at the world I grew up in, which refused to make a shape for me to fit within. Anger at the various people who knowingly and unknowingly stifled my flamboyance, my difference. Anger at the systems that governed and enforced the norms from which I couldn't help but stray. And consequently, anger at myself, at times, for my simple act of being, and how complicated it made my life.

But I am less interested in the reasons behind my anger, in that they are not new to me. I am interested instead in this act of containment, the instinct to put out the flames when they dare flicker. I am interested in it because I often see it replicated in the gay men around me, in direct contrast to our straight counterparts, who wield their anger boldly, feeling an entitlement to public rage, hot faces, raised voices, the full gamut. Gay men, from what I have observed, seem much more likely to follow the custom of women in this sense, to self-regulate, having had their rage thoroughly quashed over the course of their lives.

I have already written about gay men's unique positioning as both arbiters and victims of the patriarchy, and when it comes to this containment of rage, I see the same dynamics play out. We sit in the tension of the in-between. The patriarchal systems that police the anger of any individual who refuses to uphold them target women primarily, for the fact of their mere existence. But gay men, embodying an alternative masculinity, present a slightly different threat to the status quo, and are aggressively oppressed through homophobia in the form of violence, ridicule, social exclusion, and harassment.

But what remains true is that gay men still grow up as boys1. Unlike girls, we are socialised to understand that we do have entitlement to our rage, that it can be expressed loudly and haughtily, no matter the consequences. It's only later, when our queerness becomes apparent and we step out of line with the aforementioned oppressive conventions of masculinity, that we have the means seized from us. It's a confounding thing, to be given the manual for patriarchal anger and then be told to not follow its instructions, or else.

So many of us contain our anger, all the while governed by a deep-seated fear, not only of the threat of male violence which we have suffered, but from the male violence we have the capacity to incarnate. When I feel a surge of anger and am moved to express it, I see the imprint of my oppressor within me, because I am my oppressor, at least a version of them. I divert my rage because if I embody it in the way that I've been taught, if I unleash it onto others and in turn harm them, I am no different from the men whose rage I was subject to, whose rage was used to keep me in line, push me down.

But holding onto anger is not a sustainable practice. We are not storage units, we are porous beings, and what we hold onto seeps slowly into us. The anger I have contained has not diverted to nowhere, it's been diverted back into me, and I have often drowned in it. I see this internalised anger in the exacting standards gay men hold themselves to, the desire to be the best, to have the most. And I see it played out in how quick we are to cut each other down. Now that I've seen this mechanism in me, I see it in gay men everywhere.

So what to do with this unspent rage? Where to put it without repressing or oppressing? I am writing this at the juncture of this realisation, at the beginning of my understanding of it, and so as yet don't have an alternative instruction manual to offer. But it was in chatting with my therapist that I got an insight as to how I, without even knowing it, may have been channelling my anger effectively all these years.

But you are an angry person, he said softly, you're so angry at the world you live in that you keep trying to make it better.

And I think somewhere in that lies the answer.

Hello from my favourite café in London. I have spent many an hour here over the years that I lived in the city, so much so that I unofficially have my own nook, which whenever I return to the city seems to be magically free for me in amongst the chaos of East London yuppies, despondent freelancers and poodle-crosses that frequent the space.

I return to this café every time I revisit the city for a few reasons. For one, the coffee is pretty fucking good. But also, habit, because habit grounds me and London is a fiercely ungrounding place. There's something about the act of stepping back into little places of familiarity over and over that allows me to meet the edges of myself which have become unfamiliar. Let me explain. When I sit back in this nook, this little corner of sameness, I am transported to the last time I was here, and so slowly come to sense all of the new things that have budded and bloomed inside me since. It's like a spot the difference puzzle but for my inner world. I ponder the relationships that have begun and ended, the epiphanies that have re-mechanised me from within, the decisions that I did and did not make, the decisions I didn't even know were coming.

As someone who has chosen a life of moving, it is a privilege to find these spaces and to sit within them, still, even just for a moment. Really it's a privilege to be able to reckon with these small internal changes as I experience them in any way at all. To see that you are changing as you change is a new thing for me. Perhaps this is the accrual of wisdom. Perhaps this grey city has me wistful.

There has been a marked uptick of tension in my relationships lately, mostly in friendships I've had for a long time. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing that has spun me out. But I've observed it with curiosity, this trend of increased misunderstandings, of mounting frustrations, of someone acting in a way I don't know them to act. I am lucky enough to mostly have friends with whom I've been able to navigate these minor conflicts together gently and carefully. But irrespective, I've been contemplating it. Why this surge in interpersonal friction?

It wasn't until earlier today, sat snugly in my nook that it dawned upon me that it's the amassing and momentum of all these pesky changes within me and everyone I love. These little changes, these new ways of becoming we acquire as we grow and learn and live life's hurts and joys, they add up. And as we do the sums, previously unseen ways of being open up and become possible paths to tread, stretching and fraying the tethers that hold our relationships together. Suddenly we are using a new vocabulary to make meaning in our lives, and our friends are left with the unexpected task of translating a language they don't recognise. Multiply this across a matrix of friendships and all of a sudden there are little, quiet frictions everywhere.

My friends and I are in a collective whirlwind of personal change. Maybe it's our age, that clumsy holdover between your late 20s and mid-30s where there are violent divergences on what life is supposed to all really mean, babies and mortgages rubbing up against benders and elaborate holidays. I look at my friends and I see that we are all in this act of becoming, but in a way that feels less elastic and open than it did in earlier decades. Roots are being laid down and lines are being etched in the sand. And we are all trying to relate to each other through our conflicting choices.

But maybe this is the work of friendship? That to truly be someone's friend across the course of their life is to accept the many different formations and dynamics you will exist within, that your paths will meet and diverge in chaotic and wonderful ways, and that the choice to stay put, to see the intrinsic beauty within whatever shape the person you care about takes, is sort of the point. In some ways, it's quite romantic. Maybe friendships are the most romantic relationships of all.

All I know is that in the seasons of my life, there have been people who have stayed and people who have left, and those that have stayed all have one thing in common. They may have bristled as I morphed into someone less familiar, furrowed their brows with puzzlement as I rehearsed a version of myself I'd never tried out before. But after the dust of transformation settled, and a slightly different me emerged, they've all rolled up their sleeves and dived into the messy business of figuring out how to love me all over again, differently, better.

And today the simple miracle of this fills me with gratitude.

Thanks for reading, and welcome to my new subscribers! My last newsletter did that thing that sometimes happens on the internet and wormed its way into a bunch of strangers feeds, so if you're new here thanks for subscribing and welcome to this writing experiment. I'm grateful to be in your inbox. If you'd like to dive into any previous writings, I've written on the body politics of how men relate to fatness; the act of trying to connect to nature even when nature is dying (can you tell I still hate autumn?); and the messy, paradoxical nature of grieving grief.

As always please feel free to share this post, or to comment to let me know your thoughts. I really enjoy chatting on this platform!

I read bell hooks’ formative book The Will To Change over the tail end of my summer holidays. Lazing on deck chairs in southern Albania, my poor travel companion suffered through various “fucks” and “oh wows” culminating in spontaneous rants about just how deep the tendrils of the patriarchy showed up even in the most unexpected corners of our lives. It was a reminder more than a revelation, something I already knew but perhaps shamefully had allowed to fade into the recesses of my mind. Not the existence of the patriarchy per se, but the fact that men too suffered in this prison of our making.

The book was hitting different because this year I have been forced out of my patriarchal patterning by pure necessity. It's been a year of emotional turmoil, experiencing the grief of a relationship ending in a way that totally enveloped me, that I couldn’t possibly weather alone. The entire ordeal forced me into an uncomfortable level of disclosure with friends, an unveiling of the emotional world which up until this point I had largely managed to contain. For the first time ever, I called a friend crying. I messaged at the point of crisis rather than once the crisis had de-escalated. I let my loved ones in even when I didn’t know what I wanted from them, when my feelings were messy and confused, when I felt I was breaking.

And not coincidentally, all the friends who encouraged me to do this, and who actively made themselves available, were women.

hooks speaks in her book about alternative masculinities, about encouraging men to dream up what a masculinity that doesn’t come prepackaged with the subjugation of women could look like. I read this smugly at first. I am the alternative masculinity, I scoffed, the world is constantly reminding me of it. My queerness makes sure of that.

And, like, sure. This isn’t categorically wrong, but it’s a conveniently shallow analysis. The masculinity I embody is an alternative one, but not the one hooks is advocating for. Me and many of the queer men around me hold up oppressive norms of masculinity, while simultaneously performing a ritual of distance from them, as if our queerness absolves us. Eye rolling at straight men being emotionally constipated, while containing the rawest of our feelings to be processed alone. Grimacing at the unchecked sexual objectification of women, while objectifying women through reductive idolatry. Finding covert ways to challenge masculine beauty ideals all while never straying too far from them.

So big whoop, gay men perpetuate the patriarchy, not an original thought. But what I’ve been openly wondering is what the consequences of this are on our ability to care for each other. While we cling onto these core tenets of manliness, of containing our feelings, we deny each other the chance to see our suffering mirrored, validated, spoken to. In many ways we are a group united through a shared suffering, a shared repudiation of the heteropatriarchal expectations of our gender, and yet as men we so rarely let each other in to the details, the plot points of our desolation.

When I look to my gay male friends, I see that we circle gingerly around each other’s emotions while performing availability to them. Liberated from the expectation of total stoicism, we have the ability to offer each other care, to look each other in the eye and acknowledge the existence of challenging feelings. But that’s often where it ends. “I’m here for you” we all say to each other, while never daring to take each other up on the offer, to actually let each other into the unchecked mess of our emotional world. After all, what could be more vulnerable than to actually ask for the help we are collectively feigning the existence of?

It’s why I’ve always struggled with the framing that gay men are in “community”. Community by definition confers a sense of mutual support that in my experience, gay men of my generation only puncture the most superficial layers of. We support each other in ways that don’t require of us a shared vulnerability, that conform to our conditioning as men who must trudge through life’s various hurts alone.

I sense that it wasn’t always this way, that in times of collective grief we are able to break through this barrier. The AIDS crisis is full of heart-wrenching stories of gay men acting as families do, of guiding each other intimately through the most abject physical and emotional suffering. We can care for each other when it really counts. But I lament a world where we can only access this from each other when in the midst of global catastrophe.

I have been trying to break the cycle of emotional poverty among my gay friends, in part because I don’t want to rely solely on the women in my life (who are socialised into, and much better practiced at, finding strategies for mutual support) to be the receptacle of all my distress. But it’s hard. Me and the gay men in my life are all islands, the building of such a bridge between us has to be a mutual endeavour, both parties have to be willing to spill their guts a little. And I sense that holding us all back is the fear, often shaped from a lifetime of being misunderstood, that our emotional needs cannot truly be met. How can we begin to build a type of support system we've never actually experienced? How can we trust that when we find the courage to open up, we will actually be held in all our complexity? And how can we band together to address the core of the problem - the patriarchal system we both benefit from and inherently resist against?

I don’t yet have the answers. In fact, I think I'm still forming the questions.

Thanks for reading and hello from London! I so appreciate your comments and replies so please keep them coming if you feel so inclined. I'm experimenting with writing every fortnight, as the cadence feels much more manageable and allows me to delve into something with a bit more consideration. How do you feel about a fortnightly newsletter over a weekly one? Here's a little travel snap below. Have a great week!

One of the challenges about committing to this newsletter has been grappling with my understanding of the form it is supposed to take. The majority of newsletters I'm subscribed to are usually a tightly worded vehicle for a long-form "take", a short but meaningful exploration into a particular idea, a particular thought. And it's a form I really appreciate, and at times, when the planets align, can inhabit successfully.

But if I'm honest, writing these thought-through opinion-forward articles has always felt like I am trying on a piece of ill-fitting clothing. Sometimes I can style it out, but at the end of the day it hangs awkwardly on my body. It's wearing a suit that doesn't quite suit.

I've always been a little intimidated by the level of mental fortitude and consistent focus writing such a piece takes. This has always been a struggle of mine, to follow a thought out to its end without meandering into a hundred little detours, inspecting various crevices and nooks on the way. I've since come to recognise and pathologise this tendency (hello ADHD diagnosis) and to try and approach it with tenderness rather than resistance. Writing this week's newsletter is a part of that.

This week I am writing in the way that my brain interfaces with the world - in short, condensed stabs. Thoughts that have come and gone from my brain over the last few weeks and haven't been put down anywhere. I'm taking inspiration partly from Things I Know For Sure (worth a read), Patricia Lockwood's writing in No One Is Talking About This, and hell, Twitter hot take culture. Twitter is where I began to really write anyway, and I'm starting to realise that it's in part because the form suits how I think. 

So anyway, here are ten things I don't know for sure, but I do know right now.

1. Shame doesn't go away in the way you wish it would. It tends to dissipate at the same rate that it accrued, and if that's over a lifetime then your work is cut out for you. I still feel it pool in the bends and angles of my body. I speak to it. I hold it gently. And whenever I feel able, thank it for how it tried to protect me from an unforgiving world.

2. One of the best ways I've become sensitised to the suffering of someone less privileged than me has been to be in relationship with that person and learn of their particular plight through witnessing the small, repeated ways it manifests in their life. On a one-to-one level this almost always works. But I don't think its scalable without reproducing harmful dynamics.

3. Gay men have an adjacency to liberated ideals of sexuality that are brilliant and important and revolutionary. We have the freedom to blur the lines in our relationships with each other and experiment with non-normative ways of building intimacy that might not be easily categorised. But also - good old fashioned friends that you don't also sleep with have an important and unique place in our support circle, and we suffer without them. 

4. Once every six months I become utterly convinced that the key to my sustained happiness within capitalism is to convince all my friends to pool together our money and buy a big house within a short commuting distance from a major city and collectively eschew all of the bullshit milestones expected of millennials in their thirties. Then I think of the logistics of communal living and the state of my savings account and let go of the idea until it inevitably resurfaces.

5. When it comes to going to the gym or exercising frequently, I think few of us can separate the idea of improved health from improved aesthetics because we've grown up in a culture that has intentionally conflated the two in order to make us feel bad about ourselves (and then sell us solutions to resolve that feeling). I enjoy going to the gym because it makes me feel better both in my body (in the felt sense) and about my body (in the intellectual sense) and trying to cleave those two from each other feels futile.

6. There is no correct way to be witnessing the large-scale depravity and violence of the world around us. There is a responsibility on us to care for the suffering of our fellow human beings, and yet the world is also designed to distract us away from it, and feel dwarfed by the enormity of it, again and again. I am constantly existing in the tension that I am both not doing enough and am also probably doing as much as I can within my capabilities. And all of this is wrapped in the uncomfortable knowledge that to be thinking any of these thoughts at all is a result of having distance from the brutal reality of said suffering, which is the ultimate privilege.

7. The class dynamics that dictate who gets to be successful at what are the most pernicious of all in part because they're so difficult to make visible. I am yet to operate in an industry where the majority of people at the apex of success haven't been airlifted there by a network of Oxbridge school friends, a wealthy and connected family or partner, or growing up within a particular milieu. This was particularly striking to me as an immigrant in the UK, where even the world of leftist politics, journalism and organising is populated with people who all went to the same schools and quietly uplift each other, all while making a living on rallying against the system that they grew up in.

8. The quality of my life is dictated by the quality of my friendships (a slight paraphrase of Esther Perel here). The more I allow my friends into the complicated, messier parts of myself, the more I feel alive, and the more I feel at home in myself. To choose someone to be in your life over and over, through the various versions of yourself you become, without anything codified to bind you to one another, is a particular and under-celebrated form of love.

9. Dating apps have completely fucked up my ability to understand eroticism and romance. A man unexpectedly smiled at me on the metro last week and it dawned on me that more happened within me bio-chemically in that fleeting moment than I've ever experienced in a conversation negotiated by screens and an algorithm. And yet, I for one am baffled by in-person flirtation, having never had to stumble my way through it without the option of logging into what is essentially a game that feels much safer, even if that safety begets a kind of inhuman sterility.

10. I am convinced that as they get better, none of us will be able to have a healthy relationship with video games. I already cannot have video games in my life without them taking over every waking moment not populated by some other totally unavoidable adult responsibility. Games are so insanely immersive now that you can inhabit and create life in a completely different world. I don't know how anyone wields that power without falling into it.

Thanks for reading! This is the first of these I've shared out beyond my inner circle, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit nervous. I'd be super happy to hear your thoughts / comments / feelings, even if it's just a hello - you can either comment on this post within the app, or just reply to this email. I appreciate you supporting this writing experiment.

Lisbon has gone grey this week. I knew it was coming - I left anxiously last week for Spain and made a silent wish that when I returned there'd still be hopeful spurts of sun peeking through the clouds. Alas. Of course it's not that bad, I am famously prone to dramatics around weather that is not completely, unambiguously hot. But still, the autumnal shift has happened and with it, my body has gone a bit wobbly, my mornings are slower than usual, and everything just feels a bit… more shit?

I've never actually been diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder, I've never felt the need to pathologise what I know to be true, which is that as summer recedes and winter approaches, I am stuck in a state of perpetual glumness, and my primary objective is to move through it, move around it, live with it. It's never anything I've felt strongly enough about to make a big fuss about, though perhaps the friends who had to endure eight years of me circling the edge of a nervous breakdown every winter in London would beg to differ.

I have a habit, as many of us do, of thinking of myself as in some ways separate from my natural environment. I see the weather as something that happens around me, rather than to me, and there's a part of me that's deeply resistant to the idea that something as basic as how much light I'm getting or what temperature my body is having to adjust to, could be the source of what is spinning my brain the fuck out. I've been reflecting recently on how rooted this notion is in all of us, this stubborn refusal to acknowledge that we are a part of the natural world as much as any other being and just as much subject to its whims, no matter how many impressive structures we build around us or invisible information networks we engage with. It took a few winters in London of exploring everything else that I thought could be wrong in my life - my employment, my love life, the state of the world - before I succumbed to what felt like both the simplest and most complex answer - that I just hadn't seen the sun for a while, that I probably just needed to "touch some grass".

I've been curious recently about what it would look like to swing hard in the other direction, to connect with the natural environment in a more integrated way. I've started trying to conceptualise the natural world around me as a kind of character in my life, something I interact with, that I can be in dialogue with. And for me, at least, it's hard. Jenny Odell in How To Do Nothing talks about intentionally connecting with your bio-sphere (the specific cabal of animals, plants and nature endemic to the area you live in) through making time to learn the names of the beings around you and observe them. And of course everything I've ever read that speaks to indigenous ways of knowing the world (Braiding Sweetgrass, Sand Talk) echoes the same sentiment. I recently worked with someone on a training who is a keen bird watcher and environmentalist and seeing him effortlessly name and interact with the animals and plants around us (we were in an old farmhouse in Catalunya, teeming with wildlife) created in me such a profound sense of awe and jealousy that I promised myself I'd start going on more nature walks.

So this year I am posing myself a gentle challenge, where rather than positioning myself in opposition to the oncoming greyness, I instead try to remain curious about it, what it might be telling me, the conversation it might be starting. I am going to try to approach the browning of the trees with wonder, and see if I can spot any critters I'm not used to seeing. I am going to look into what vegetables and fruit are shifting into season and see what I can magic up with them. And when I wake up and the air feels stale and the world outside is more crisp than I want it to be, I'm going to channel all my seasonal frustration into a question and see if the morning answers back.

Wish me luck - and happy Autumn! (is this a thing people say?)

Thanks for reading! I am finding it really great to be on a writing cadence, and being generous to myself when life is happening and I can't make my made-up deadline (hence no newsletter last week). As always open to feedback and thoughts from you all - and thanks for letting me invade your inbox once a week.